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AMERICAN  AUTHORSHIP 

OF 

THE  PRESENT-DAY 

(SINCE  1890) 


AMERICAN  AUTHORSHIP 

OF 

THE  PRESENT-DAY 

(Since:  1890) 


BY 

T.  E.  RANKIN 
University  of  Michigan 


ann  arbor 

George:  Wahr 

1918 


Copyright,  191 8 
By  T.  E.  Rankin 


THE  ANN   ARBOR    PRESS 
ANN    ARBOR 


PREFACE 

Not  all  of  us  can  agree  with  Brunetiere  that  in  art 
and  literature  the  beginning  of  wisdom  is  to  distrust 
what  we  like.  But  there  is  no  division  of  opinion 
about  the  kind  of  books  to  which  the  majority  of  read- 
ers to-day  devote  themselves,  —  it  is  only  the  kind 
that  they  "like."  I  do  not  believe  that  we  ought  to 
deny  to  ourselves  what  gives  us  pleasure  just  because 
it  gives  us  pleasure ;  but  it  is  the  aim  of  this  little  book 
to  be  an  aid  to  better  reading  than  that  which  gives 
mental  excitement  alone.  "Our  heritage  as  Americans 
is  independence,  originality,  self-reliance,  and  sympa- 
thetic energy  animated  by  a  strong  ethical  instinct, 
and  these  are  the  forces  which  can  produce  a  higher 
and  broader  civilization  than  the  world  has  yet  seen 
if  we  choose  to  have  it  so."  We  shall  not  be  choos- 
ing to  have  it  so,  if  in  feeding  the  mind,  as  the  mass 
of  people  do  by  reading  chiefly,  we  overlook  the  books 
which  touch  moral  truth  and  human  passion  with 
largeness,  sanity,  and  attractiveness  of  form.  The  fol- 
lowing pages  attempt  to  indicate  only  those  books 
which,  amid  the  deluge  of  publication  during  the  last 
quarter  of  a  century  in  the  United  States  and  Canada, 
are  most  worth  while  finding  and  keeping  for  com- 
panionship. 


393917 


—  4  — 

I  wish  to  acknowledge  indebtedness  to  the  eager 
spirit  in  search  of  "good  reading"  which  is  constantly 
displayed  by  my  students;  and  to  Professor  R.  W. 
Cowden  for  patient  and  valuable  aid  in  reading  the 
proofs  for  this  volume. 


CONTENTS 


I.    PROSE  page 

General  Literature  ...       9 

Fiction 23 

Drama       ......     59 

II.    POETRY 

Poetic  Drama  .         .         .         -67 

Chiefly  Lyrical        .         .         .         .69 

III.     CANADIAN  AUTHORS 

Fiction  Writers        .         •         •         •     91 
The  Poets 94 

IV.    TABLE  OF  AUTHORS         .         .         .103 

V.    INDEX  .  .         .         •         .117 


I 

PROSE 


I 

PROSE 


The  Profession  of  Letters.  —  Joseph  Story,  As- 
sociate Justice  of  the  Supreme  Court,  wrote,  in  1819,  °unnedred 
"So  great  is  the  call  for  talents  of  all  sorts  in  the  active  years  ago 
use  of  professional  and  other  business  in  America, 
that  few  of  our  ablest  men  have  leisure  to  devote  ex- 
clusively to  literature  or  the  fine  arts,  or  to  composition 
on  abstract  science.  This  obvious  reason  will  explain 
why  we  have  few  professional  authors  and  those  not 
among  our  ablest  men."  Precisely,  such  is  the  situation 
now  one  hundred  years  after  the  eminent  jurist  courte- 
ously explained  the  state  of  letters  in  his  day.  The  call  And  to-day 
for  talent  in  the  varied  activities  of  a  public  character 
never  was  greater  in  the  world's  history,  and  the  ability 
and  energy  now  devoted  to  affairs  of  state  and  of  busi- 
ness are  of  the  highest  order.  And  yet  many  able  men 
and  women  are  giving  themselves  almost  exclusively 
to  thoughtful  and  artistic  authorship;  furthermore, 
many  whose  vocation  is  the  law,  or  medicine,  or  bank- 
ing, or  teaching,  or  editing,  are  also  employing  a  por- 
tion of  their  talents  in  adding  to  the  beauty,  uplift, 
refreshment,  and  inspiration  which  it  is  the  function 
of  literature  to  bring  to  men.  We  need  many  more 
whose  brains  can  beat  into  rhythm  what  we,  "busy" 
people,  can  feel  only,  who  can  express  what  we,  too,  The  Future 
hold,  that  things  beautiful  are  best. 


IO   

The  majority  of  those  who  are  making  the  litera- 
ture   of    America    to-day    are    engaged    in    writing 

Fom  prose  fiction  or  drama  or  poetry.  Yet  there  are  nu- 
merous scholarly  and  influential  historians,  philoso- 
phers, and  essayists  whose  work  is  contributing  to  the 
advancement  of  thought  and  life,  though,  with  but  few 
exceptions,  their  productions  lack  the  antiseptic  of 
style.  But  all  are  writing  because  they  must,  —  they 
are  actuated  by  the  drive  of  impulse  from  within,  — 
and  because  there  is  an  eager  demand  for  what  they 
can  supply.    If  there  has  been  any  change  in  methods 

stylo  of  composition  and  in  details  of  style  since  fifty  years 
ago,  it  has  been  in  the  direction  of  simplicity,  terse- 
ness, and  elimination  of  ornament.  However,  the  ex- 
treme brevity  of  sentence  which  is  the  vogue  with  the 
younger  generation  often  gives  the  impression  of  thin- 
ness of  thought,  and  rather  wastes  than  conserves  the 
attention  by  the  over-emphasis  which  results  from  the 
explosive  character  of  the  short,  sharp  phrase. 


GENERAL  LITERATURE 

Historians.  —  Within  the  past  thirty  years  many 
historians  have  flourished,  the  work  of  whom  will  al-  a  multitude 
ways  be  indispensable  to  the  student  of  history.  Among 
them  have  been  John  Fiske,  Henry  Adams,  James  Ford 
Rhodes,  James  Schouler,  Edward  Channing,  John 
Bach  McMaster,  Alfred  Thayer  Mahan,  Albert  Bush- 
nell  Hart,  and  Woodrow  Wilson,  but  of  these  perhaps 
only  John  Fiske  and  Woodrow  Wilson  will  be  consid- 
ered by  future  historians  of  literature. 

John  Fiske  was  born  at  Middletown,  Connecticut, 
in  1842.  From  his  earliest  youth  he  was  distinguished  Fiska 
as  an  eager  reader  and  a  serious  thinker  both  in  his- 
tory and  in  science.  He  soon  began  to  display  wide 
scholarship  and  diversified  mental  interests.  One  of 
his  earlier  books  manifested  also  a  gift  .for  story-tell- 
ing and  for  the  play  of  fancy.  This  book  was  enti-  General 
tied  Myths  and  Myth-Makers.  It  traced  to  their 
sources  many  popular  superstitions  and  legends  based 
upon  both  fancy  and  fact.  His  Outlines  of  Cosmic  Phi- 
losophy is  an  interpretation  of  the  discoveries  of 
Charles  Darwin  and  a  development  of  the  thought  of 
Herbert  Spencer.  The  Destiny  of  Man  and  The  Idea 
of  God  were  also  among  Fiske's  contributions  to  philo- 
sophic thought.  His  Excursions  of  an  Evolutionist 
interestingly  and  convincingly  presented  his  experi- 
ence and  thinking  in  the  field  which  the  title  indicates. 
Then  the  American  Political  Ideas  is  among  the  best 
of  books  setting  forth  the  fundamental  things  in  Amer- 
ican political  life. 


12    

Fiske's  best  work  of  all  was  done  in  the  field  of  his- 
His  tory  proper,  particularly  in  The  Discovery  of  America. 

The  Beginnings  of  New  England,  and  The  Critical 
Period  of  American  History.  Of  these  three  books  The 
Discovery  of  America  is  the  ablest.  It  is  not  only  an  ac- 
count of  the  voyages  of  Columbus  and  of  his  prede- 
cessors and  those  who  soon  followed  him,  but  is  also 
a  summary  of  the  old  world  stories  of  a  fabled  western 
world  and  a  masterful  and  attractive  description  of 
the  background  of  European  civilization  at  the  time  of 
the  discovery  of  this  continent.  In  addition  to  the 
popularity  accruing  from  these  and  other  volumes,  the 
work  of  Fiske  as  a  university  lecturer  brought  to  him 
great  renown.  He  died  July  4,  1901,  a  loss  to  popular 
philosophy  and  science  and  history  and  to  literature. 
Woodrow  Wilson,  professor  in  and  then  president 
Wilson  of  Prmceton  University,  Governor  of  New  Jersey,  and 
President  of  the  United  States  for  two  terms,  begin- 
ning in  19 12,  first  attracted  attention  by  his  political 
and  semi-literary  writings  while  he  was  teaching  in 
Georgia.  He  has  written  one  important  book,  The 
State,  upon  the  theory  of  government,  and  others  of 
less  importance  upon  the  same  subject.  The  most  val- 
uable of  his  works  consist  of  a  small  volume  entitled 
Division  and  Reunion,  which  treats  of  the  period  of 
the  Civil  War  and  Reconstruction,  and  a  series  of  five 
volumes  containing  in  interesting  narrative  form,  and 
with  thoughtful  comment,  the  history  of  the  United 
States  and  of  the  American  continent  before  the  for- 
mation of  the  union.  The  addresses  and  state  papers 
written  during  the  great  World  War  are  almost  ideal 
for  their  clearness,  directness,  and  energy.     An  early 


—  13  — 

volume  entitled  Mere  Literature  and  Other  Essays 
had  already  given  artistic  promise  which  these  state 
papers  have  amply  fulfilled. 

Essayists  in  Journalism,  Philosophy,  and  General 
Culture.  —  Of  general  essayists  to-day,  the  number  is 
almost  beyond  reckoning,  but  the  talents  of  most  of 
them  have  found  employment  in  writing  chiefly  for  the 
periodical  press.  The  greater  part  of  the  content  of  journalism 
the  periodicals  is  doomed  to  brief  life  and  fame,  but  is 
certain  of  a  large  immediate  circulation.  Journalism 
in  America,  including  daily,  weekly,  monthly,  and 
other  serial  publications,  at  the  beginning  of  the  twen- 
tieth century  had  attained  the  phenomenal  quantity  of 
eight  billions  of  copies  of  periodicals  for  twelve 
months,  with  a  market  value  of  two  hundred  and  twen- 
ty-five millions  of  dollars.  The  subsequent  eighteen 
years  have  seen  a  progress  in  volume  whose  raptdity 
has  been  almost  beyond  belief.  It  has  been  estimated 
that  two  hundred  and  fifty  millions  of  dollars  are  now 
spent  annually  in  the  United  States  for  newspapers  The 
only,  and  that  these  newspapers  represent  a  cost  of  Newspapcr 
two  hundred  and  thirty-seven  millions  more  than  all 
the  text-books  in  all  the  public  schools.  Newspapers 
pour  from  the  press  in  unending  succession  and  in  edi- 
tions that  are  enormous.  New  York  city,  as  might  be 
expected  from  its  size,  location,  and  great  wealth,  has 
drawn  to  it  the  most  ambitious  publishers  and  editors. 
The  Evening  Post,  The  Tribune,  The  Sun,  The  Times, 
and  The  World,  are  unsurpassed  for  enterprise  and 
influence.  Opinions  vary  as  to  their  relative  merits,, 
but  The  Times  gives  more  attention  to  literature  than 
does  any  one  of  the  others,  and  at  present  contains  the 


—  14  — 

best  written  editorials.  The  Boston  Transcript,  The 
Springfield  Republican,  and  The  Chicago  Tribune  are 
now  generally  considered  the  ablest  of  the  newspapers 
published  outside  the  metropolis. 

The  eighteenth  century  saw  the  rise  and  decay  of  a 
Magazines  score  of  good  monthly  magazines  in  this  country,  from 
the  early  ventures  of  Franklin  to  the  attempts  of 
Charles  Brockden  Brown.  During  the  first  half  of 
the  nineteenth  century  nearly  all  the  foremost  thinkers 
and  authors  were  associated  with  magazines,  either  as 
editors  or  as  contributors.  Among  the  editors  were 
Washington  Irving,  Richard  Henry  Dana,  Sr.,  George 
P.  Morris,  Samuel  Woodworth,  Nathaniel  P.  Willis, 
William  Cullen  Bryant,  Charles  Fenno  Hoffman, 
Edgar  Allan  Poe,  George  R.  Graham,  George  Ripley, 
Margaret  Fuller,  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  Park  Ben- 
jamin, and  Mrs.  Caroline  M.  Kirkland.  The  contrib- 
utors included  practically  all  the  names  that  find  men- 
tion in  American  history  from  1800  to  1850.  But  only 
one  or  two  of  the  magazines  of  that  half-century  have 
survived,  the  most  important  being  the  North  Ameri- 
can Review,  which  was  founded  in  181 5,  and  is  now 
the  oldest  of  all  periodicals. 

In  1850  Harper's  New  Monthly  Magazine  was  es- 
tablished, and  was  quickly  followed  by  the  founding 
of  Putnam's  Monthly  Magazine  and  The  Atlantic 
Monthly.  Between  1868  and  1895  the  following  popu- 
lar monthlies  were  established :  Lippincotfs  Magazine, 
The  Overland  Monthly,  The  Century  Magazine,  Scrib- 
ner's  Magazine,  The  Forum,  The  Cosmopolitan,  The 
Arena,  Munsey's  Magazine,  McClure's  Magazine,  and 
The  Bookman.     The  finest  contributions   have   been 


—  i5  — 

made  to  The  Atlantic,  Harper's, .  The  Century,  and 
Scribner's.  The  Nation,  a  weekly,  T/te  Dial,  a 
monthly,  and  The  Sewdnee  Review,  a  quarterly,  are 
among  the  ablest  of  the  publications  devoted  to  reviews   Critical 

.  publications 

and  literary  criticism.  A  recently  founded  review,  The 
New  Republic,  came  at  once  into  favor,  especially 
among  those  who  were  wearied  of  the  cock-sureness 
and  air  of  intellectual  superiority  which  have  so  long 
characterized  The  Nation.  But  the  newer  magazine 
appears  to  be  finding  it  difficult  to  avoid  the  beaten 
path. 

It  is  amid  this  variety  and  this  immensity  in  number 
of  publications  that  the  essayist  has  almost  lost  him- 
self ;  for,  in  writing  for  the  daily  newspaper  he  speaks 
chiefly  for  the  moment  and  to  the  passing  crowd,  and 
in  writing  for  the  magazines  he  is  not  often  doing  more 
than  trying  himself  out.  But  if  his  magazine  contribu- 
tions prove  to  be  successful,  they  are  likely  at  a  later 
time  to  be  found  in  book  form.  Newspaper  arti- 
cles published  as  books  have  usually  found  but  brief 
popularity. 

Among  the  many  essayists  of  this  day,  a  few  have 
stood  forth  prominently,  —  William  Dean  Howells,  ™^a  ists 
F.  Marion  Crawford,  Frank  Norris,  Samuel  McChord 
Crothers,  Agnes  Repplier,  Paul  Elmer  More,  and  Laf- 
cadio  Hearn  being  those  who  seemingly  are  sure  of 
readers  fifty  years  hence.  We  can  hardly  fail  to 
include  John  Burroughs  among  the  essayists  of  our 
day,  though  his  greater  works  were  all  published  be- 
fore 1890.  His  books  since  that  date  include  fourteen 
titles,  and  one  of  them  is  a  volume  of  poems.  Mr. 
Howells  also  belongs  to  a  generation  older  than  the  Howells 


16  — 


present,  but  his  Criticism  and  Fiction  was  published  as 
late  as  1895.    F.  Marion  Crawford's  little  book  called 

Crawford  The  Novel  —  What  It  Is  will  certainly  be  a  classic  in 
the  field  of  inquiry  concerning  the  art  of  the  novel. 

Norris  Frank  Norris's  The  Responsibilities  of  a  Novelist  will 
not  fail  to  stimulate  every  reader  who  is  awake  to 
what  is  important  and  original  in  criticism. 

Samuel   McChord   Crothers   has   published   several 

Crothers  books  whose  material  has  been  collected  from  various 
magazines.  The  Gentler  Reader  surpasses  all  the  rest, 
and  has  made  an  epoch  in  many  a  young  student's 
reading  life.  The  work  of  Mr.  Crothers  has  an  un- 
broken charm,  humor,  and  uplifting  power. 

Reppiier  Agnes  Repplier,  born  of  French  parentage  in  Phil- 
adelphia, exhibits  much  of  the  strongly  individual 
temperament  which  makes  the  writer  of  power.  She 
is  interesting  for  the  note  of  protest  which  runs 
through  all  her  work,  a  dissent  from  widely  accepted 
modern  views  of  things.  Yet  she  is  keenly  alive  to  all 
that  is  occurring  in  the  world  of  to-day,  and  not  hos- 
tile to  its  life  so  much  as  critical  of  its  easy-going 
opinions.  Her  essays  may  be  found  in  almost  every 
first-class  magazine,  where  they  are  eagerly  sought  for 
by  the  cultivated  reader.  From  Books  and  Men  pub- 
lished in  1888  to  The  Cat,  19 12,  there  is  a  baker's 
dozen  of  books,  all  of  them  pleasant,  witty,  and 
thoughtful. 

A  more  scientific,  more  widely  informed,  and  more 
philosophic  critic  than  Miss  Repplier  is  Paul  Elmer 
More,  formerly  a  teacher  and  now  on  the  editorial  staff 

More  of  The  Nation.  Mr.  More  has  appealed  to  the  reader 
who  is  not  merely  cultivated  but  cultivated  within  a 


—  i7  — 

special  field,  that  of  criticism  which  is  based  upon  in- 
terpretative philosophic  insight  rather  than  upon  per- 
sonal impressions.  His  Shelbume  Essays,  in  several 
volumes,  represent  the  best  that  is  known  and  thought 
to-day  in  the  way  of  a  steadfast  spiritual  interpretation 
of  what  men  of  letters  have  been  doing  in  the  world. 
He  is  greatly  interested  in  artistic  form,  and  in  all  ele- 
ments of  natural  beauty  to  be  found  in  books ;  but  he 
is  interested  even  more  in  the  fundamental  brain-work 
which  is  inspired  by  and  guided  by  ethical  and  religious 
mood. 

Lafcadio  Hearn  must  be  accorded,  even  in  so  brief  Lafcadio 

Hearn 

a  book  as  this,  much  more  extended  treatment,  for  his 
creative  imagination  sets  him  as  an  artist  far  above 
most  of  his  contemporaries.  His  origin  was  not 
American.  He  was  born  in  1850  upon  one  of  the 
Greek  islands.  His  father  was  an  Englishman  and  his 
mother  a  Greek.  He  was  educated  in  England,  but 
removed  to  America  and  became  a  journalist  at  Cin- 
cinnati and  then  at  New  Orleans,  and  later  a  teacher, 
and  finally  an  extensive  traveller.  The  last, years  of 
Hearn  were  spent  in  Japan.  He  is  best  known  as  a 
writer  upon  topics  connected  with  that  country,  where 
he  became  a  Japanese  citizen,  married  a  Japanese 
woman,  and  upon  his  death  in  1904  was  buried  with 
full  Buddhist  rites,  the  first  foreigner,  if  a  citizen  of  a 
country  can  be  called  a  foreigner  there,  to  be  so  distin- 
guished in  the  island  empire. 

Several  of  Hearn's  books  were  published  before  our 
period,  among  them  Stray  Leaves  from  Strange  Lit-  Early  work 
eratures,  Some  Chinese  Ghosts,  and  Chita.     The  first 
two  show  their  author's   faculty   for  assimilation  of 


—  i8  — 

foreign  ideas  and  for  stamping  them  with  his  own 
imagery  and  thought.  Stray  Leaves  reveals  his  early 
interest  in  things  Egyptian,  Indian,  Finnish,  and  He- 
brew. Some  Chinese  Ghosts  re-tells  the  content  of 
certain  bits  of  Chinese  literature.  Comprehension  of 
and  sympathy  with  the  elusive  mystery  of  the  Orient 
is  here  both  strong  and  delicate;  the  work  is  original, 
too,  as  gems  cut  and  re-set  are  counted  original  with 
the  lapidary.  Chita:  A  Memory  of  Last  Island,  is  a 
story  of  the  sea  and  of  the  hurricane  which  destroyed 
a  Caribbean  Sea  island  resort  of  wealthy  citizens  of 
New  Orleans,  a  story  of  human  love  and  misery,  a 
tragic  story  of  how 

Nature  whistled  with  all  her  winds, 
Did  as  she  pleased,  and  went  her  way. 

In  descriptive  power  no  other  book  by  its  author  ex- 
ceeds Chita.  But  others  are  more  thoughtful,  as  they 
were  more  mature. 
Later  and  Just  before  his  death,  Lafcadio  Hearn  read  the  print- 
work  er's  proofs  of  the  most  thoughtful  of  his  books,  Japan, 
an  Interpretation.  Three  others,  however,  are  more 
often  read,  —  Kotto,  Glimpses  of  Unfamiliar  Japan, 
and  Kokoro.  The  word  "Kokoro,"  as  the  sub-title 
"Hints  and  Echoes  of  Japanese  Inner  Life"  indicates, 
means  something  equivalent  to  "heart,"  as  when  we 
speak  of  "the  heart  of  things."  This  book  contains  sev- 
eral brief  essays,  each  complete  in  itself,  and  is  replete 
with  ideas  that  are  somewhat  unusual  to  the  western 
mind.  Some  of  the  essays  are  extraordinary  both  for 
thought  and  for  artistic  grace  and  power,  among  them 
"By  Force  of  Karma,"  "The  Idea  of  Preexistence," 
and  "The  Genius  of  Japanese  Civilization."  The  last  is 


—  19  — 

the  most  interesting  to  one  who  is  an  observer  of  the 
recent  entrance  of  Japan  into  a  sphere  of  world-activ- 
ity. In  1917  was  brought  out  an  edition  of  Hearn's  lec- 
tures delivered  at  a  Japanese  University,  and  entitled 
Life  and  Literature.  This  book  is  an  excellent  one 
with  which  to  initiate  oneself  into  the  thought  and 
work  of  Hearn.  The  student  of  literature  is  interested 
to  find  style  defined  here  as  character,  and  literature, 
in  so  far  as  it  is  a  fine  art,  as  the  best  expression  of  the 
most  intimate  experience. 

JHearn  was  an  unusual  artist  in  words.  Restrained 
in  representing  his  thought,  suggesting  rather  than  set-  JJjJ  thought* 
ting  it  out  in  systematic  detail,  strangely  subtle  in  the 
bearing  of  his  suggestions,  graceful  and  deft  in  de- 
scriptive touch,  he  is  sure  of  bringing  back  again  and 
again  to  his  books  any  intelligent  reader  who  once 
dips  within  them.  The  thought  of  Hearn  reverberates 
in  one's  mind,  after  he  has  read  him,  as  the  music  of  a 
bell-like  instrument,  and  moves  one  with  the  meanings 
with  which  it  is  fraught.  It  is  disturbing,  too,  to  some 
traditional  ideas  of  the  occidental  mind  concerning 
things  we  have  deemed  of  importance.  His  most  im- 
posing thinking  has  been  exerted  upon  the  effort  to 
fuse  the  spirit  of  western  evolutional  science  with  the 
Indian  Buddhism  which  had  already  fused  itself  with, 
or  grafted  itself  upon,  the  artistic  sense  of  Japan.  A 
strange  compound  he  makes,  but  a  most  modern  one. 
The  beauty  of  his  language  is  partly  due  to  its 
strangely  new  meaning,  and  to  the  fact  that  it  is  char- 
acterized, as  the  Japanese  language  is,  by  an  aversion 
to  saying  all  and  leaving  nothing  to  the  reader's  im- 
agination.     Mingled   with   the    savor   and    flavor   of 


20   


Hearn's  western  experience,  all  this  is  intensely  mod- 
ern, —  even  ahead  of  its  time.  He  will  be  more  eagerly 
claimed  by  us  as  time  advances. 

Philosophy  American  philosophy  has  tended  in  our  day  to  ex- 

pend its  interest  upon  practical  psychology  and  educa- 
tional problems  rather  than  upon  the  problems  of  the 
origin  and  nature  and  destiny  of  the  universe,  or  what 
is  called  metaphysics.  The  average  man  ignores  the 
claim  of  philosophy  to  be  the  science  of  the  sciences, 
and  desires  to  know  what  the  philosopher  can  do  to 
help  him  get  on  in  the  world.  The  philosopher  of  to- 
day seems  to  desire  to  meet  the  demand  as  much  as  he 
can,  though  is  not  entirely  neglectful  of  the  old  search- 
ings  after  the  truth  about  first  and  ultimate  things. 
Hence  the  prevailing  character  of  the  labors  of  John 
Dewey,  William  James,  Borden  Parker  Bowne,  and 
Josiah  Royce. 

Dewey  John  Dewey  stands  among  the  foremost  of  the  'in- 

tellectuals" of  the  present  day  in  America.  His  studies 
in  educational  theory  and  in  social  conditions  have  led 
to  a  number  of  thoughtful  volumes,  all  lacking,  how- 
ever, in  warmth  and  fervor  and  therefore  having  lit- 

Bowno  tie  appeal  to  the  average  reader.     Professor  Bowne's 

Principles  of  Ethics  falls  within  the  present  period, 
having  been  published  in  1892,  and,  as  are  his  earlier 
works  upon  psychological  theory,  upon  the  philosophy 
of  Herbert  Spencer,  upon  theism,  and  upon  metaphys- 
ics, is  worthy  of  careful  perusal  by  the  student  of  the 

josiah  Royce  thought  of  the  United  States.  Professor  Royce,  a 
Calif ornian,  who  gave  his  attention  largely  to  popular- 
izing the  thought  of  Hegel,  was  a  much  more  free  and 
fresh    and    vigorous    author    than    either    Dewey    or 


21    

Bowne,  even  though  he  wrote  of  the  more  theoretical 
aspects  of  man's  thought  upon  the  world  and  man 
rather  than  upon  the  practical  procedure  of  man's 
life.  The  Spirit  of  Modem  Philosophy,  The  Concep- 
tion of  God,  Studies  of  Good  and  Evil,  The  Concep- 
tion of  Immortality,  and  The  World  and  the  Individ- 
ual, all  published  between  1892  and  190 1,  are  notable 
books  of  a  notable  thinker. 

But  it  is  William  James  who  has  held  the  advantage  yjjjjj™ 
over  his  fellow  philosophers  because  of  the  clearness 
and  simplicity  and  audacity  of  his  style.  He  has  at 
times  written  of  philosophical  problems  in  almost  the, 
language  of  "the  man  in  the  street."  Perhaps  he  has 
occasionally  thinned  his  thought  down  by  doing  so, 
but  his  influence  in  both  America  and  Europe  appears 
as  yet  to  have  been  all  the  more  effective  for  this  fresh- 
ness and  even  carelessness  of  style.  Between  1890  and 
1907  William  James  wrote  Principles  of  Psychology,  in 
two  volumes,  The  Will  to  Believe  and  Other  Essays 
in  Popular  Philosophy,  Human  Immortality,  The  Va- 
rieties of  Religious  Experience,  and  Pragmatism,  and 
many  other  books  and  articles.  It  has  recently  been 
asserted  that  Prussianism  and  Pragmatism  are  in  the 
long  run  convertible  terms,  and,  while  this  judgment  is 
too  harsh,  it  is  true  that  great  numbers  of  people  have 
too  readily  surrendered,  without  thought,  to  James's 
way  of  thinking,  —  to  the  belief  that  the  value  of  a 
thing  depends  wholly  upon  its  working  efficiency.  Yet 
the  books  of  William  James  are  very  modern,  and 
they  are  eminently  readable.  It  still  remains  to  bring 
philosophy  more  closely  down  to  earth  than  he  has 
brought  it. 


22    


American  Universities  have  many  able  and  original 
thinkers  and  expounders  of  philosophy  among  their 
professors.  Whether  they  will  take  a  place  in  the  his- 
tory of  our  literature  does  not  yet  appear.  Perhaps 
Santayana  the  work  of  George  Santayana  should  not  be  passed 
entirely  by,  especially  his  volumes  upon  The  Sense  of 
Beauty  and  Reason  in  Art;  but  he  belongs  with  greater 
right  to  literature  through  his  disclosing  the  "soul's 
invincible  surmise"  in  his  sonnet  sequence.  These  son- 
nets are  somewhat  subdued  in  emotion,  but  are  very 
nearly  perfect  in  their  technique,  and  are  filled  with 
thought,  now  elusive  and  again  straightforwardly 
simple  and  appealing.  After  all,  philosophy  and  poetry 
are  not  unallied. 

Amid  the  multitude  of  authors  who  have  attempted 
description  and  interpretation  of  the  life  of  nature 
upon  our  west  coast,  John  Muir  is  supreme.  His  The 
Mountains  of  California  is  a  book  bright  with  the 
beauty  of  the  spirit  of  its  author  as  well  as  with  the 
grandeur  and  charm  of  its  subject. 


A  Literary 
Naturalist 


II 

WRITERS  OF  FICTION 

The  Short-Story. — The  story-tellers  in  the  prose 
of  our  own  time  may  be  grouped  as  Short-story  Writ- 
ers, Writers  of  Novelettes,  and  Novelists.  If  at  first 
thought  the  classification  of  the  novelette  apart  from 
the  other  two  types  of  prose  fiction  seems  not  justified, 
perhaps  it  may  not  seem  entirely  so  when  its  discus- 
sion has  been  presented. 

The  leading  short-story  writers  since  1890  have 
been  Henry  Cuyler  Bunner,  Henry  van  Dyke,  Ham- 
lin Garland,  Gertrude  Atherton,  Margaret  Deland, 
Mary  E.  Wilkins  Freeman,  Alice  Brown,  William  Syd-  JJjJJJStwi* 
ney  Porter  (O.  Henry),  James  Oppenheim,  Thomas 
Nelson  Page,  and  James  Lane  Allen.  Shall  we  in- 
clude others?  At  what  name  should  we  then  draw 
the  line?  These,  at  least,  are  names  of  writers  about 
whose  standing  there  can  no  longer  be  much  contro- 
versy ;  but  if  we  were  to  place  with  them  Myra  Kelly, 
Katherine  Fullerton  Gerould,  Bruno  Lessing,  Joseph 
Lincoln,  Lloyd  Osbourne,  or  even  Jack  London,  there 
would  be  a  definite  demand  from  almost  every  reader 
that  this,  or  that,  or  another  be  added  to  the  list  of 
names  of  the  enchanters.  Each  of  those  we  have 
named  as  fairly  certain  of  lasting  fame  has  been  imi- 
tated, but  each  remains  unequalled  in  his  special  field. 
And  yet  no  one  of  these  has  risen  to  equality  with 
their  predecessors  who  dominated  the  short-story  field 
a  generation  ago,  Bret  Harte,  Henry  James,  Thomas 
Bailey  Aldrich,  and  George  Washington  Cable. 


24  — 


Bunner 


H.  C.  Bunner  was  for  years  editor  of  Puck,  and  his 
short-stories  are,  most  of  them,  humorous  in  concep- 
tion and  in  development  of  detail.  He  had  the  power 
of  perfectly  focusing  the  interest  upon  one  situation,  — 
which  is  the  truly  distinctive  art  of  the  modern  short- 
story.  It  is  doubtful  whether  any  writer  of  short- 
stories  ever  has  handled  striking  endings  in  a  more 
masterly  fashion  than  did  Bunner,  unless  it  was  the 
French  writer  Maupassant.  And  Bunner  knew  how 
few  details  were  necessary  to  secure  sufficient  fixing 
of  attention  upon  the  point  of  his  story.  His  stories 
are  as  American  as  any  ever  written.  Possibly  the 
best  of  them  are  A  Sisterly  Scheme  and  Our  Aromatic 
Uncle. 

Henry  van  Dyke  has  been  a  clergyman,  a  Princeton 
professor,  and  a  diplomat  in  the  foreign  service  of  the 

van  Dyke  United  States.  His  writings  are  varied  in  kind  and  in 
subject-matter,  ranging  through  lyric  poetry,  literary 
drama,  theology,  and  prose  fiction.  His  publications 
fill  a  rather  large  shelf,  though  many  of  them  are  de- 
ficient in  force  and  apparently  careless  or  at  least  hasty 
in  phrasal  construction.  But  the  stories  in  The  Blue 
Flower  and  in  The  Unknown  Quantity  are  quite 
worthy  of  the  praise  that  the  public  has  accorded 
them.  The  little  Story  of  the  Other  Wise  Man  has, 
as  its  title  suggests,  a  Biblical  background,  and  is  told 
with  dignity  and  impressiveness.  While  the  style  of 
van  Dyke's  prose  is  occasionally  ruined  with  affecta- 
tion, yet  the  content  of  his  work  is  wholesome,  and  at 
times  has  been  found  inspiring. 

Garland  Hamlin  Garland  has  contended  that  one  should  write 

of  only  what  he  knows,  and  his  own  practice  has  fol- 


—  25  — 

lowed  his  requirement.  Essays,  novels,  and  short- 
stories  have  poured  from  his  pen ;  but  it  is  the  short- 
stories  that  best  represent  what  he  has  seen  and  ac- 
tively shared  in.  Hamlin  Garland's  early  life  was 
spent  upon  what  was  then  the  frontier,  —  in  Iowa, 
Illinois,  Wisconsin,  Minnesota,  and  Dakota.  His  stor- 
ies are  of  frontier  life  in  that  region,  though  not  en- 
tirely of  its  poverty,  its  grimness,  its  dullness,  its  over- 
work. Some  critics  have  found  Garland's  work  leaden- 
hued  and  that  alone ;  but  such  critics  cannot  have  read 
him  very  far.  His  Main-Traveled  Roads  and  Other 
Main-Traveled  Roads  contain  quite  enough  that  rep- 
resents emptiness  of  spirit,  weariness  of  living,  almost 
hopeless  melancholy,  and  ferocious  toil,  but  there  is 
also  in  them  much  of  homely  humor,  and  much  of  en- 
joyment of  life.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  one  who 
thinks  of  Hamlin  Garland  as  always  somber  and  de- 
pressing can  have  read  "Among  the  Corn-Rows,"  "The 
Creamery  Man,"  "William  Bacon's  Man,"  or  "Elder 
Pill,  Preacher."  Garland's  work  cannot  be  said  to  have 
in  high  degree  the  quality  of  literary  elegance,  but  it 
has,  in  the  short-stories,  the  quality  of  convincingness, 
and  much  of  it  is  very  entertaining. 

While  Gertrude  Atherton  is  best  known  for  her  Athert°n 
journalistic  work  and  for  her  novels,  especially  The 
Conqueror,  a  story  of  Alexander  Hamilton,  yet  her 
short-stories  of  the  life  in  the  California  of  the  days 
before  its  acquisition  by  the  United  States  deserve  and 
in  time,  it  is  not  unsafe  to  predict,  will  secure  a  large 
and  interested  audience.  The  most  unique  of  these 
short-stories  are  in  the  volume  with  the  attractive  title 
The    Splendid    Idle    Forties.      Whether    they    accu- 


—   26   — 

rately  reflect  the  California  (where  their  author  was 
born)  of  the  old  days  does  not  matter,  —  Homer's 
Iliad  does  not  accurately  reflect  the  old  days  of  Greece 
and  the  Troad,  but  it  is  none  the  less  interesting  and 
valuable.  Gertrude  Atherton  in  19 17  published  a  vol- 
ume of  essays  entitled  The  Living  Present,  and  ded- 
icated "To  Eternal  France." 

The  short-stories   (some  consider  them  novelettes) 

Deiand  m  Margaret  Deland's  Old  Chester  Tales,  published  in 
1899,  put  their  author  upon  a  plane  of  favorable  com- 
parison with  any  writer  of  narrative  of  her  time.  Some 
of  the  characters  in  these  stories  are  among  the  most 
attractive  in  American  fiction.  Amid  so  much  contem- 
porary literature  leading  to  disquietude  of  mind  and 
heart,  it  is  richly  satisfying  to  read  these  wholesomely 
.  stimulating  tales. 

"I  think  the  Lord  must  have  thought  a  good  deal  of 
common  people,"  said  President  Lincoln,  "he  made  so 
many  of  them."  There  are  many  common  people  in  the 

Freeman  tales  of  Mrs.  Mary  Eleanor  Wilkins  Freeman,  nearly 
all  of  them  New  England  women.  Whether  they  were 
thought  much  of  by  their  creator,  it  is  not  possible  to 
say,  but  they  were  thought  much  about.  Mrs.  Free- 
man is  one  of  the  very  few  good  writers  who  can  do 
their  work  without  much  revision,  because  she  is  so 
careful  to  plan  and  think  through  to  smallest  detail  her 
stories  before  she  pens  them.  In  temperament  Mrs. 
Freeman  resembles  Hawthorne,  gloomy,  brooding, 
though  not  quite  morbid,  more  strongly  affected  even 
than  he  by  the  sordidness,  the  pathos,  and  the  tragedy 
of  the  narrow,  distorted  life  of  the  unintelligent  New 
England  Puritans  and  their  country-bred  descendants. 


—  27  — 

She  is  scrupulously  exact  in  her  workmanship,  but 
lacking  in  the  sure  stylistic  touch  of  her  master.  Her 
stories  are  distinctly  New  England  in  setting,  and  lim- 
ited almost  exclusively  to  the  vainly  struggling,  des- 
perately suffering,  but,  amid  it  all,  unreasoning  char- 
acters of  rural  life.  She  does  not  display  the  bitter 
hostility  to  the  conditions  of  life  surrounding  her  vil- 
lage and  country  characters  which  is  characteristic  of 
Hamlin  Garland  in  his  stories  of  the  Middle-West 
farming  communities.  Mrs.  Freeman  is  more  evenly 
somber  than  Garland,  less  willing  to  break  out  in 
flashes  of  genial  humor  than  he, — a  Hamlin  Garland 
in  a  Hawthorne  environment,  and,  partly  because  of 
the  environment,  perhaps,  a  greater  writer.  Her  nov- 
els, Pembroke  (which  is  her  best),  The  Portion  of 
Labor,  The  Shoulders  of  Atlas,  and  one  or  two  others 
of  less  note,  are  sufficient  to  illustrate  her  spirit  and 
her  accomplishment  in  style  and  in  delicately  energetic, 
almost  profound,  character-drawing.  Her  short-stories, 
however,  have  brought  her  the  larger  audience,  chiefly 
because  they  do  not  require  so  long  sustained  a  con- 
centration of  fascinated  and  yet  often  unwilling  atten- 
tion as  the  novels,  and  because  they  are  somewhat  more 
ingenious  in  incident  and  plot  than  they.  The  short- 
stories  in  A  New  England  Nun  and  Other  Stories,  in 
Silence  and  Other  Stories  (especially  "The  Little  Maid 
at  the  Door"  and  "Evelina's  Garden"),  and  in  The 
Wind  in  the  Rose-Bush  and  Other  Stories  of  the  Su- 
pernatural are  among  the  most  artistic  and  the  most 
pathetically  moving  stories  in  American  literature. 

One  of  New  England's  most  successful  story  writ-  Brown 
ers  is  Miss  Alice  Brown,  —  of  Boston  now,  though 


—   28   — 

her  birthplace  and  childhood  home  was  in  New  Hamp- 
shire. She  has  written  poetry,  novels,  travel  glimpses, 
a  ten  thousand  dollar  prize  play,  and  at  least  two  col- 
lections of  excellent  short-stories,  Meadow-Grass  and 
Vanishing  Points.  The  first  of  these  collections 
brought  the  breath  of  country  air  to  its  readers,  and 
the  second  concerned  itself  chiefly  with  members  of 
over-cultivated  city  society.  We  could  not  spare  the 
first;  and  the  second  leaves  us  better  informed  and 
soberly  thoughtful.  In  Vanishing  Points  is  the  un- 
mistakable influence  of  Henry  James,  with  that  analy- 
sis which  takes  one  step  beyond  that  which  before  had 
been  the  vanishing  point.  Even  the  phraseology  of 
James  is  present  at  times  in  the  book,  but  this  natur- 
ally accompanies  the  method  of  psychological  analysis. 

Oppenheim  Pay  Envelopes,  by  James  Oppenheim  (not  E.  Phil- 
lips Oppenheim,  the  Englishman,  we  always  are  care- 
ful to  insert),  is  one  of  the  best  books  of  short-stories 
written  in  this  country.  Its  scenes  are  laid  in  and  about 
a  great  eastern  manufacturing  center.  The  aspira- 
tions, the  impulses,  the  bitter  struggles,  the  pleasures, 
too,  of  the  factory  and  mill  employees  are  here  better 
related  than  in  any  other  American  fiction.  James 
Oppenheim  has  not  done  anything  else  so  good,  noth- 
ing so  unchangeably  valuable,  —  but  it  is  a  constant 
hope  that  he  will  "come  back." 

Page  Thomas  Nelson  Page  was  born  and  lived  while  a 

boy  in  the  region  of  Virginia  where  much  of  General 
Grant's  terrible  struggle  for  the  breaking  down  of  the 
Southern  Confederacy  occurred.  Page's  father  was  a 
major  in  the  army  of  General  Lee.  Thomas  Page 
himself  began  his  public  life  about  ten  years  after  the 


—  29  — 

war,  in  the  practice  of  law.  Ten  years  of  the  law  was 
sufficient  to  give  him  part  of  the  training  which  has 
made  him  so  excellent  an  ambassador  to  Italy  during 
the  present  war. 

Page  has  written  a  large  shelf-full  of  books,  and  is 
considered  one  of  the  leading  novelists  of  the  South. 
The  novels,  with  but  one  exception,  were  published 
after  1890.  Red  Rock  (1891)  has  made  it  evident 
that  he  has  the  power  to  write  admirably  this  longer 
form  of  fiction.  But  the  novels  have  not  found  such 
favor  as  have  his  short-stories.  The  short-stories  pub- 
lished in  1896,  especially  "Marse  Chan,"  "Unc'  Edin- 
burgh and  "Meh  Lady,"  are  among  the  masterpieces 
of  literature  interpreting  the  negro.  These  tales  take 
us  into  the  very  heart  of  the  war,  not  merely  into 
that  of  the  old  plantation  days  or  that  of  the  days  of 
reconstruction  as  do  most  of  the  stories  of  the  life  of 
the  South.  In  fine  and  subtle  lines  Page  draws  the 
characters  of  plantation  owners  and  soldiers  and  slaves 
and  freedmen.  His  attitude  of  mind  toward  slavery  is 
thoroughly. sound  and  perfectly  well-balanced,  yet  over 
the  benevolent  life  of  the  plantations  with  which  he 
was  vividly  familiar  he  throws  the  softening  air  of 
wistful  and  regretful  memory. 

It  is  not  easy  to  speak  in  unrestrained  terms  of  O.   "The 

Amazing 

Henry,  because  he  is,  even  now  after  his  death,  the   Genius  of 

■        "        /  O.  Henry' 

most  popular  of  all  short-story  writers.  Everybody, 
from  the  school-boy  to  his  "high-brow"  professor,  ap- 
pears to  be  enamored  of  O.  Henry.  Ex-Premier 
Asquith  has  asserted  that  O.  Henry  is  his  favorite,  and 
University  librarians  confess  that  no  other  writer's 
books  are  so  widely  circulated.  Stephen  Leacock,  the 


—  3o  — 

Canadian  humorist,  can  scarcely  contain  himself  for 
admiration  when  he  writes  of  the  Amazing  Genius  of 
O.  Henry.  William  Sydney  Porter  seems  to  have  been 
born  at  Greensboro,  North  Carolina,  in  1867,  though 
several  towns  claim  the  honor  of  having  been  his  birth- 
place. He  went  to  Texas  and  there  worked  upon  a 
ranch,  as  one  should,  and  then  in  a  newspaper  office, 
and  soon  owned  a  paper  at  Austin.  The  newspaper 
which  came  under  his  control  he  called  The  Rolling 
Stone.  O.  Henry  also  worked  in  a  bank  for  a  time, 
and  then  drifted  down  into  Central  America.  He 
returned  to  Texas,  to  clerk  (for  two  weeks)  in  a  drug 
store.  Next  we  find  him  in  New  Orleans,  writing  for 
the  daily  press.  Later  his  permanent  residence  for  the 
nine  years  preceding  his  death  was  New  York  City. 
Here  he  accomplished  his  finest  work,  such  volumes  of 
short-stories  as  The  Four  Million,  The  Voice  of  the 
City,  and  The  Trimmed  Lamp,  —  or,  are  Options, 
Strictly  Business,  Whirligigs,  and  Roads  of  Destiny 
the  better  books  ?  And  yet  many  have  maintained  that 
the  stories  in  The  Gentle  Grafter  are  best  of  all ! 
Central  America,  The  South  and  West,  and  New 
York  City  (which  he  loved  to  call  Bagdad-on-the- Sub- 
way) furnished  the  settings  for  most  of  his  stories,  — 
two  hundred  and  fifty-two  in  all;  and  perhaps  the  best 
single  story  is  the  one  in  Strictly  Business  entitled  "A 
Municipal  Report." 
Why  so  Upon  what  does  O.  Henry's  popularity  rest?  Upon 
Popu  ar  ^  \CaSt  f  our  things  :  ( 1 )  His  fearless  revelations  of 
the  pettiness  of  pretense  in  all  life,  high  and  low  and 
all  that  lies  between;  (2)  his  honest  and  open  admira- 
tion for  the  romantic  elements  in  life;  (3)  his  fresh- 


—  3i  — 

ness  and  directness  in  the  use  of  language ;  and  (4)  his 
exaggeration  of  both  the  humorous  and  the  pathetic. 
Add  to  these  his  marvelous  gift  for  plot  and  for  sur- 
prise, and  we  find  him  not  merely  popular  alone,  but 
an  excellent  artist  as  well.  Long  may  his  books  live ! 
And  yet  they  may  not  live  very  long,  because  they  deal 
almost  exclusively  with  the  transient  in  immediate  set- 
ting and  in  speech. 

James  Lane  Allen  is  a  native  of  Kentucky,  born  AUei* 
there  in  1849.  He  taught  school  and  college  classes  for 
several  years;  but  since  1884  has  given  himself  to  lit- 
erary work.  "In  so  far  as  literature  is  concerned,  expe- 
rience has  taught  me  and  has  always  compelled  me  to 
see  human  life  as  set  in  Nature ;  finding  its  explanation 
in  soil,  and  sky,  and  season;  merely  one  of  the  wild 
growths  that  spring  up  on  the  surface  of  the  earth 
amid  ten  thousand  of  others."  Thus  he  wrote,  and  his 
stories  of  old  and  new  Kentucky  are  illustrations  of 
this  asserted  belief  of  his,  —  except  that  he  takes  hu- 
manity a  little  more  seriously  than  to  consider  it  merely 
a  "wild  growth"  with  all  the  irresponsibility  which  such 
a  character  would  imply.  Man  in  his  setting  of  earth 
and  sky  and  season,  yet  man  within  society,  is  Mr. 
Allen's  object  of  interest. 

Allen  is  a  novelist  as  well  as  a  short-story 
writer,  The  Choir  Invisible,  The  Reign  of  Law,  and 
The  Mettle  of  the  Pasture  ranking  high  among  the 
productions  of  our  southern  novelists.  Two  little 
books  with  the  life  of  birds  as  starting-point  have  been 
accorded  strong  public  approval,  A  Kentucky  Cardi- 
nal (1894)'  and  The  Kentucky  Warbler  (1918).  Seek- 
ers for  sensations  in  fiction  have  expressed  disappoint- 


—  32  — 

ment  with  this  latest  of  his  writings,  though  he  who 
loves  a  classic  style  will  find  the  book  a  thing  of  beauty. 
But  undoubtedly  the  volume  entitled  Flute  and  Violin, 
and  Other  Kentucky  Tales  and  Romances  is  that  by 
which  he  is  chiefly  to  be  remembered,  for,  if  for  no 
other  reason,  within  it  is  the  inimitable  story  of  the 
"Two  Gentlemen  from  Kentucky."  This  story  should 
not  be  described  or  outlined ;  not  one  bit  of  its  charm 
and  excitement  and  originality  of  incident  and  of  char- 
acter should  be  taken  away  from  the  reader  by  any  tell- 
ing beforehand  of  what  is  in  the  story.  Another  story 
by  Allen,  "King  Solomon  of  Kentucky,"  should  be 
read  by  every  one  who  loves  the  heroic  in  life,  wher- 
ever found. 

James  Lane  Allen  has  much  of  the  attitude  of  sci- 
entist and  of  philosopher  toward  nature ;  but  above  all 
it  is  human  life  which  is  most  appealing  to  him  and 
to  those  who  take  delight  in  following  him.  Perhaps 
he  is,  at  times,  too  ardently  addicted  to  expressing  his 
teaching  instinct,  surviving  from  the  earlier  days,  and 
to  much  polishing  of  his  style.  But  his  work  is  strong, 
and  beautiful,  and  wholesome. 

Our  bede-roll  would  be  deplorably  deficient  if  men- 
others  tion  were  not  made  of  Edwin  Lefevre's  "The  Woman 
and  Her  Bonds"  in  his  Wall  Street  Stories,  of  Robert 
Herrick's  The  Master  of  the  Inn,  and  of  F.  Marion 
Crawford's  The  Upper  Berth.  Nor  is  it  possible  to 
refrain  from  commending  the  rather  too  academic  but 
none  the  less  promising  stories  of  Mrs.  Anne  C.  E. 
Allinson  in  her  volume  Roads  from  Rome.  It  is  the 
occasional  ability  of  a  writer  or  teacher  to  make  the 
characters   of   ancient   days   seem   contemporary   that 


A  Few 


—  33  — 

keeps  alive  our  faith  in  the  large  importance  of  so- 
called  classical  studies. 

Born  into  life ! — 'tis  we, 

And  not  the  world,  are  new; 
Our  cry  for  bliss,  our  plea, 

Others  have  urged  it  too — 

Our  wants  have  all  been  felt,  our  errors  made  be- 
fore. 

In  Roads  from  Rome  Mrs.  Allinson  has  included  six  v?0er^ncicnt 
stories,  "sketches"  she  calls  them,  concerned  with  Revived 
characters  from  the  time  of  Julius  Caesar  to  that  of 
Hadrian.  In  these  pages,  Horace,  Virgil,  Ovid,  Mae- 
cenas, Catullus,  and  other  more  and  less  known  men 
of  classical  antiquity  truly  live  for  us:  There  would 
be  more  culture  abroad  in  the  land  if  more  of  litera- 
ture of  this  quality  were  available  to  the  aspiring  stu- 
dent. 

The  Novelette.  —  The  novelette  is  an  old  form  of 
literature,  reaching  back  to  the  Book  of  Esther,  by  an  Ancient 
unknown  Hebrew  author,  to  Daphnis  and  Chloe,  by 
Longus,  a  Greek,  and  to  Cupid  and  Psyche,  by  Apu- 
leius,  a  Latin.    The  form  was  continued  in  the  middle  Mediaeval 
ages,  its  best  example  being  Aucassin  and  Nicolette, 
by  an  Old  French  author  whose  name  is  not  known, 
and  containing  almost  the  first  breath  of  the  Renais- 
sance  spirit   in   literature.     Then   came   The  Liberal 
Lover,  by  Cervantes ;  and  in  Eighteenth  century  Eng- 
lish literature  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  by  Goldsmith, 
and  Rasselas,  by  Dr.  Johnson.    Novelettes  were  rather 
frequent  in  English  during  the   Nineteenth  century,  Modem 
none  of  them  better  than  Dickens's  Christmas  Carol, 


—  34  — 

Mrs.  Gaskell's  Cousin  Phyllis,  and  the  three  stories  in 
George  Eliot's  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life.  This  brings  us 
to  the  later  days  of  literature  in  America,  when  the 
novelette  became  a  very  important,  though  not,  in  ex- 
cellent examples,  a  very  frequent  form  of  fiction. 
The  novelette  has  been  difficult  to  define.  Nearly 
What  it  is  au  wj10  nave  undertaken  to  say  anything  of  it  have 
confined  their  descriptions  and  definitions  to  a  discus- 
sion of  its  comparative  length  or  brevity.  It  is,  they 
all  say,  usually  longer  than  the  short-story  and  shorter 
than  the  novel,  —  a  thing,  then,  of  middle  magnitude, 
a  sort  of  middle  sister  to  the  other  two  forms  of  prose 
fiction.  But  on  the  basis  of  such  a  distinction  as  that 
of  length  or  brevity,  one  might  as  well  speak  of  the  two 
or  three  act  play  as  a  dramalette  or  dramolet,  which  no 
\  one  appears  anxious  to  do.  There  are  other  and  better 

|  distinctions ;  such  as  that  the  novelette  affords  more 

scope  for  the  development  of  character  than  does  the 
short-story,  though  for  the  development  of  fewer  char- 
acters than  the  novel  can  compass.  The  novelette,  too, 
may  divide  itself  into  parts,  thus  resulting  in  a  more 
imposing  structure  than  the  short-story.  It  should  be 
more  "taut  and  trim,"  however,  than  a  novel,  not  in- 
dulging at  all  in  digressions  or  episodes.  And  per- 
haps the  nature  of  the  purpose  or  of  the  theme  or  of 
the  experience  from  which  the  story  grows  deter- 
mines that  the  novelette  shall  be  what  it  is,  —  some- 
thing not  either  short-story  or  novel.  A  biological 
analogy  which  has  been  suggested  as  the  basis  of  dis- 
tinction is  as  good  as  any ;  that  the  seed  or  germ  from 
which  the  novelette  grows  determines  that  it  shall  be 
neither  flower  nor  tree,  but  a  shrub. 


—  35  — 
In  American  literature  there  have  been  many  popu-  The 

J    r    r         American 

lar  novelettes  during  recent  years,  not  the  least  popu-  Novelette 
lar  of  them  being  Eleanor  Hallowell  Abbott's  The 
Sick-a-bed  Lady  and  The  White  Linen  Nurse,  and 
Irving  Bacheller's  Keeping  Up  with  Lizzie.  But  these 
have  been  inferior  to  somewhat  earlier  successes,  such 
as  Francis  Hopkinson  Smith's  Colonel  Carter  of  Car- 
tersville,  Henry  James's  The  Lesson  of  the  Master, 
Mrs.  Ruth  McEnery  Stuart's  Napoleon  Jackson,  The 
Gentleman  of  the  Plush  Rocker,  Stephen  Crane's  The 
Red  Badge  of  Courage,  Francis  Marion  Crawford's 
A  Cigarette-Maker's  Romance,  Herman  K.  Viele's 
The  Inn  of  the  Silver  Moon,  Kate  Douglas  Wiggin's 
The  Old  Peabody  Pew,  and  Mrs.  Edith  Wharton's 
Ethan  Frome.  In  fact,  the  last  of  these  has  been 
acclaimed  the  strongest  bit  of  American  authorship  of 
the  present  time. 

F.  Hopkinson  Smith,  a  native  of  Baltimore,  was  a  Snuth 
painter  and  a  lighthouse  architect  before  he  became  a 
writer  of  note.  He  has  written  several  novels,  one  of 
which,  Caleb  West,  —  Master  Diver,  will  long  be  re- 
membered. But  his  novelettes,  Colonel  Carter  of  Car- 
tersville  and  Colonel  Carter's  Christmas,  are  his  bid  for 
even  longer  fame.  The  first  is  a  most  attractive  pic- 
ture of  the  old  regime  in  the  South,  and  the  second 
only  a  little  less  attractive.  Both  are  rather  rambling 
in  structure,  especially  the  second.  It  seems  a  little 
surprising  that  a  civil  engineer  could  be  satisfied  with 
a  loose- jointed  piece  of  building,  even  in  a  literary 
structure;  and  it  is  the  lack  of  carefully  constructed 
plot  which  makes  these  brief  bits  of  fiction  among  the 


—  36  — 

less  artistic  of  American  novelettes.  But  Colonel  Car- 
ter himself  is  beyond  praise  for  charm. 

The  reader  interested  in  the  life  of  art  instinctively 

5JJ2JJ  finds  his  way,  at  some  time,  into  the  work  of  Henry 

James.  Henry  James  belongs  almost  entirely  to  the 
period  immediately  preceding  ours,  and  yet  we  must 
mention  here  those  incomparable  long-short-stories  or 
novelettes  of  his,  The  Lesson  of  the  Master  and  The 
Madonna  of  the  Future.  They  are  only  for  the  thought- 
ful lover  of  books,  and  they  are  not  easy  to  read ;  but  to 
some  readers,  lack  of  ease  of  interpretation  is  no  bar  to 
pleasure,  —  they  delight  to  be  called  upon  to  think. 

Mrs.  Stuart  Mrs.  Ruth  McEnery  Stuart  is  one  of  that  immor- 
tal company  of  American  story-tellers  who  have  at 
times  made  their  special  study  and  delight  the  negro 
and  the  general  environment  of  the  South,  where  the 
negro  is  an  outstanding  figure.  F.  Hopkinson  Smith, 
Joel  Chandler  Harris,  Thomas  Nelson  Page,  James 
Lane  Allen,  Sarah  Barnwell  Elliot,  George  W.  Cable, 
O.  Henry,  Mrs.  Sherwood  Bonner  MacDowell,  Mrs. 
Louise  Clark  Prynelle,  Miss  Martha  Young,  Harry 
Stillwell  Edwards,  Richard  Malcolm  Johnston,  Mrs. 
Virginia  Fraser  Boyle,  Paul  Laurence  Dunbar,  —  and 
there  are  many  more,  —  have  found  the  negro  finely 
susceptible  of  literary  treatment.  Few  of  these  au- 
thors have  been  more  highly  amusing  than  Mrs.  Stuart, 
and  few  have  dealt  more  thoughtfully  with  the  humor 
and  pathos  of  the  old  plantations. 

The  negro  in  American  literature  has  become  well 
worth  the  investigation  of  the  student  who  desires  en- 
tertainment and  the  pleasure  of  pursuing  something 
unique  in  the  field  of  art,  for  the  treatment  of  the 


—  37  — 

negro  is  one  of  the  most  distinctive  features  of  our 
literature  in  comparison  with  that  of  Europe,  —  in 
any  event,  the  American  negro  is  not  found  abroad. 
Mrs.  Stuart's  Napoleon  Jackson  and  her  Lamentations 
of  Jeremiah  Johnson  make  an  excellent  introduction 
to  this  province  of  literature. 

The  Great  War  has  renewed  an  interest  in  the  stor- 
ies of  Stephen  Crane,  especially  his  Red  Badge  of  Stephen  Crane 
Courage.  Crane's  stories  were  nearly  all  highly  col- 
ored, and  his  heroes  usually  little  less  than  mind- 
less, or  empty-minded,  anyway,  but  in  The  Red  Badge 
of  Courage  he  achieved  one  of  the  most  remarkable  of 
all  studies  of  the  mind  of  the  soldier  in  action.  The 
book  was  immensely  popular  immediately  after  its 
publication  in  1895,  and  has  not  yet  been  surpassed  in 
the  handling  of  its  peculiar  subject-matter  by  any  of 
the  writers  of  fiction  of  the  present  war.  The  battle 
of  Chancellorsville,  during  the  war  between  the  States, 
is  the  scene  of  its  action,  and  the  psychological  analy- 
sis, in  simplest  terms,  of  the  country  boy  who  there 
underwent  his  baptism  of  blood  and  iron  and  fire,  will 
be  of  lasting  value. 

Mrs.  Edith  Wharton  would  have  come  close  to  the  Wharton 
heart-interest  of  this  generation  if  only  for  her  self- 
sacrificing  devotion  to  the  needs  of  fair  shining  France 
when  that  suffering  country  was  upon  the  brink  of 
destruction  during  the  World  War.  She  is  a  notable 
figure  in  literature.  She  is  one  of  the  numerous  au- 
thors who  have  been  taught  much  by  Henry  James 
and  have  spread  wide  his  influence.  Perhaps  those 
authors  would  never  have  found  out  precisely  how  to 
do  some  of  the  bits  of  almost  miraculous  presentation 


38 


which  so  sharply  sketch  that  which  has  come  directly 
within  the  angle  of  their  vision,  had  it  not  been  for 
Henry  James.  Mrs.  Wharton  is  easily,  together  with 
Owen  Wister  in  his  later  work,  one  of  the  first  disci- 
ples of  the  great  master.  She  is  a  novelist,  as  well  as 
a  writer  of  short-stories  and  of  novelettes,  and  her 
character  of  Lily  Bart  in  The  House  of  Mirth  has  been 
compared  with  Thackeray's  Becky  Sharp  and  George 
Eliot's  Gwendolen  Harleth,  —  a  high  compliment,  in- 
deed! And  yet  at  least  one  of  her  novelettes  is  a 
greater  piece  of  work  than  this  novel.  That  greater 
work  is  Ethan  Fromc,  a  stark  and  terrible  story  of  a 
New  England  love  affair  more  hopeless  and  bitter  than 
a  thousand  deaths.  It  is  wonderfully  told.  Another 
novelette,  Madame  de  Treymes,  is  a  subtle  tale  of  the 
struggle  of  several,  but  especially  two,  Americans  with 
the  unbreakable  bonds  of  French  society  and  family 
tradition. 

No  example  of  this  interesting  type  of  fiction,  the 

Crawford  novelette,  easily  finds  a  place  above  F.  Marion  Craw- 
ford's A  Cigarette-Maker's  Romance,  an  alluringly 
pathetic  story  of  a  Russian  nobleman  exiled  to  Munich, 
Germany,  and  suffering  from  certain  illusions  which 
alternately  exalt  and  humiliate  his  sensitive,  yet  truly 
noble,  spirit.  But  Crawford  must  be  reserved  for  the 
pages  upon  the  novelists  of  to-day. 

Tarkington  Booth  Tarkington,  also,  is  now  a  novelist  of  fame, 
though  the  fine  craftsmanship  of  an  early  story,  a  nov- 
elette called  Monsieur  Beancaire,  has  not  been  equalled 
in  the  later  novels.  The  Turmoil  is  an  absorbing 
novel,  but  its  style  is  careless,  —  busy,  noisy,  undisci- 
plined.   Penrod,  too,  amused  a  vast  number,  but  it  is 


—  39  — 

only  necessary  to  read  a  page  of  it  and  compare  with 
Aldrich,  Howells,  or  even  Charles  Dudley  Warner  or 
Charles  D.  Stewart  to  feel  that  Tarkington  is  doing 
perishable  work.  But  Monsieur  Beaucaire,  a  romance 
laid  in  the  old  city  of  Bath,  England,  excels  the  fine- 
ness of  workmanship  of  many  British  authors  upon 
their  own  ground.  It  is  one  of  the  books  which  time 
cannot  destroy. 

The  Novel.  —  No  task  is  more  difficult  than  to 
choose  the  greater  American  novelists  of  this  century. 
One  is  "playing  safe,"  however,  when  he  selects  Silas   Our 

1      J      °  _-  _  Novelists 

Weir  Mitchell,  W.  D.  Howells,  Mark  Twain,  Robert 
Grant,  Francis  Marion  Crawford,  Margaretta  Wade 
Campbell  Deland,  Kate  Douglas  Wiggin,  Owen  Wis- 
ter,  David  Graham  Phillips,  William  Allen  White, 
Frank  Norris,  Winston  Churchill,  Anne  Sedgwick,  and 
Ellen  Glasgow.  This  is  by  no  means  an  arrangement 
in  the  order  of  climax,  but  in  the  order  of  birth,  Weir 
Mitchell  being  born  in    1829  and   Ellen   Glasgow  in 

1874. 

S.  Weir  Mitchell  was  a  Philadelphia  physician,  a  Weir 

r  ,  Mitchell 

specialist  in  nerve  disorders,  who  found  relief  from 
his  exacting  professional  life  in  writing  several  enter- 
taining novels,  among  which  Hugh  Wynne,  Free 
Quaker  stands  foremost,  and  perhaps  The  Adventures 
of  Francois  a  close  second.  Hugh  Wynne  is  a  story 
of  the  time  of  the  War  for  Independence,  and  The 
Adventures  of  Francois  of  the  time  of  the  French 
Revolution.  Mitchell's  many  books  are  sane  and 
wholesome,  if  not  altogether  beautiful  in  their  grace- 
ful style  and  optimistic  tone. 


—  40  — 

The  great  book  of  Mark  Twain's  later  days  was 
A  Serious  the  Personal  Recollections  of  Joan  of  Arc.  This  is  a 
chronicle  of  the  Maid  of  Orleans  who  saved  France 
at  one  of  the  most  critical  moments  of  that  devoted 
country's  existence.  While  the  book  is  based  upon 
old  records  and  memoirs  and  is  true  to  the  historical 
character  of  its  heroine,  yet  it  is  in  reality  a  historical 
romance,  thus  belonging  rather  to  fiction  than  to  his- 
tory. This  book  added  much  force  to  the  easily  ques- 
tioned claim  of  those  who  maintain  that  Mark  Twain 
is  the  greatest  of  American  men  of  letters. 
•'The  dean  of       William  Dean  Howells  as  well  as  Mark  Twain  be- 

American 

letters"  longs   to   a  generation   ago,   and  he   has   not  in  this 

day  equalled  the  quality  of  his  work  before  1890,  ex- 
cepting in  one  point,  —  The  World  of  Chance  (1893) 
contains  the  strongest  and  best  portrait  of  a  woman  in 
all  of  Howells's  books.  There  is  much  autobiography 
in  this  book.  It  should  be  read  by  every  young  man 
ambitious  to  break  into  the  world  of  publication.  A 
Hazard  of  New  Fortunes  (1890)  is  a  characteristic 
New  York  story,  nearly  in  its  author's  best  vein,  and 
The  Flight  of  Pony  Baker  (1902)  is  a  captivating 
boys'  story.  In  general,  it  may  be  said  that  Howells 
is  no  better  workman  in  these  later  books  than  in  his 
earlier,  and  some  have  thought  that  he  has  become 
more  seriously  involved  in  social  problems  than  his 
talents  for  solving  them  warrant.  Yet  he  remains  the 
most  representative  of  American  novelists  of  recent 
time. 

Robert  Grant  Among  the  many  lawyers,  or  those  who  began  their 
careers  as  lawyers,  who  have  found  the  profession  of 
literature  more  congenial  or  more  insistently  demand- 


—  41  — 

ing  their  gifts,  Judge  Robert  Grant  of  Boston  is  one 
of  the  most  distinguished.  Another  Bostonian  whom 
the  law  has  "lent  to  literature"  is  F.  J.  Stimson, 
widely  known  by  his  pseudonymn  of  "J.  S.  of  Dale," 
but  Stimson  belongs  in  his  best  work  to  the  days  be- 
fore 1890.  Robert  Grant  is  a  good  essayist  as  well  as 
a  powerful  novelist.  His  essays,  as  in  the  Art  of 
Living,  are  refined,  humorous,  scholarly,  attractively 
written,  and,  in  fact,  about  all  that  excellent  essays 
should  be.  His  best  known  novel,  Unleavened  Bread, 
is  a  most  biting  satire  upon  the  social  climbers  of  nine- 
teenth century  America. 

Francis  Marion  Crawford  was  a  "prince  of  story- 
tellers." His  purpose,  as  he  put  the  matter  in  his  The 
Novel  —  What  It  Is,  was  to  amuse  and  interest  the 
reader.  He  frankly  asserted,  too,  that,  as  realism  pro- 
poses to  show  men  what  they  are  and  romanticism  to 
show  men  what  they  should  be,  he  would  cast  his  lot 
with  the  romanticists ;  for  "more  good,"  he  said,  "can 
be  done  by  showing  men  what  they  may  be,  ought  to 
be,  or  can  be  than  by  describing  their  greatest  weak- 
nesses with  the  greatest  art."  Crawford  early  wrote 
a  story  with  setting  in  east  India,  —  Mr.  Isaacs,  it 
was  called,  —  a  crude  but  deeply  interesting  story. 
Three  Italian  stories  he  also  wrote,  —  Saricinesca, 
(1887),  Santf  Ilario,  and  Don  Orsino.  These  three 
books  constitute  a  trilogy  (a  single  story  made  up  of 
three  separate  stories)  ;  in  this  case,  the  story  of  a 
patrician  family  of  modern  Rome  from  1865  to  about 
1888.  The  Three  Fates  (1891)  should  be  read  by 
every  young  man  and  woman  who  desires  to  pursue 
the  life  of  authorship.     These  books  come  only  short 


—  42  — 

of  being  great  books,  and  they  have  given  their  author 
as  high  a  reputation  away  from  America  as  at  home. 

Crawford  was  a  man  of  genius,  seeing  and  painting 
things  as  they  are  and  making  men  see  what  they 
should  be.  He  was  not  quite  a  great  artist,  for  he  was 
faulty  in  composition,  building,  construction.  The  rea- 
son for  this  faultiness  is  that  Crawford  attempted  the 
writing  of  what  is  called  the  Epic  Novel,  the  most  dif- 
ficult of  all  forms  of  prose  literature  to  make  a  fine 
artistic  construction  because  of  the  multitude  of  de- 
tails which  clamor  for  inclusion  in  any  structure  which 
attempts  to  be  epic.  The  epic  novel  has  been  defined 
by  "Calvin  Winter"  as  "the  type  wherein  a  great  so- 
cial movement,  a  moral  or  political  revolution  drawing 
to  a  climax  serves  as  the  background  of  the  story, 
while  the  destiny  of  some  special  group,  some  single 
family,  some  individual  man  or  woman,  closely  inter- 
woven with  the  progress  of  the  general  movement, 
forms  the  central  thread  of  the  plot,  the  focus  of  in- 
terest." Such  an  epic  is  Saracinesca,  and  its  sequels. 
A  Cigarette-Maker1 's  Romance,  a  novelette  already 
mentioned,  is  much  slighter  in  importance  of  subject 
matter  but  more  artistic  in  unity  as  it  is  also  in  charm. 
It  is  his  most  perfect  story,  so  far  as  form  is  con- 
cerned, and  most  perfect  also  in  its  picturing  of  men 
and  women  in  both  elemental  and  conventional  situa- 
tions in  life. 

While  F.  Marion  Crawford  lived  much  abroad,  yet 
he  belongs  to  America,  unqualifiedly,  —  as  a  nephew 
of  the  author  of  the  Battle  Hymn  of  the  Republic 
should. 


—  43  — 

Margaret  Deland  is  a  native  of  Pennsylvania,  but  Margaret 
has  lived  in  Boston  since  1880.  It  was  about  that 
date  Mrs.  Deland  began  her  career  of  authorship. 
Verse  was  the  form  of  her  first  attempts ;  and  then 
came  the  remarkable  novel  John  Ward,  Preacher,  a 
book  which  thoughtfully,  earnestly,  and  skillfully  han- 
dled subjects  of  the  greatest  religious  importance.  If 
this  book  were  still  her  best,  her  work  might  always 
suffer  in  comparison  with  a  similar  novel,  Robert  Bis- 
mere,  by  the  English  novelist,  Mrs.  Humphrey 
Ward.  But  the  short-stories  in  Old  Chester  Tales 
published  in  1899,  and  the  novels  The  Awakening  of 
Helena  Richie  and  The  Iron  Woman  lifted  her  above 
any  such  flat  comparison  and  placed  her  in  the  ranks 
of  those  who  must  be  considered  upon  the  ground 
of  permanency.  The  two  novels  are  bound  to- 
gether by  the  presence  of  some  of  the  same  characters 
in  each.  The  Iron  Woman  has  justly  been  pronounced 
to  be  the  strongest  in  grasp  upon  the  facts  of  life  and 
in  narrative  power  of  any  novel  produced  by  an  Amer- 
ican woman.  It  is  a  vigorous  work,  reflecting  the  in- 
dustrial life  of  Pittsburgh,  and  incidentally  carrying 
with  this  a  strong  and  beautiful  love  story.  The  book 
is  full  of  evidence  of  great  gifts  of  observation  and  of 
constructive  imagination.  Mrs.  Deland  is  prevailingly 
bright  and  cheerful  in  the  atmosphere  with  which  she 
suffuses  her  work.  She  is  capable  of  rich  humor  and 
of  deep  sentiment  and  strong  pathos.  She  is,  no  doubt, 
at  her  best  when  the  burning  issues  of  modern  life 
face  her  and  her  characters,  —  then  she  writes  with 
an  interest  which  has  made  her  one  of  the  most  popu- 
lar of  living  novelists,  and  with  a  directness  of  effect 


44 


Kate  Douglas 
Wiggin 


Wister 


which  carries  conviction  to  those  who  are  opposed  to 
her  thought.  In  191 8  Margaret  Deland  went  to  France 
to  work  in  a  canteen,  as  have  many  other  eminent 
women  of  America. 

Kate  Douglas  Wiggin  was  born  in  Philadelphia, 
lived  during  girlhood  in  rural  New  England,  and  at 
the  age  of  eighteen  removed  for  a  period  of  resi- 
dence to  California.  In  youth,  Kate  Douglas  Wig- 
gin, according  to  her  sister,  was  an  assiduous  reader, 
her  "literary  passions"  being  the  Arabian  Nights, 
Scottish  Chiefs,  Thaddens  of  Warsaw,  Don  Quixote, 
Irving's  Mahomet,  Thackeray's  Book  of  Snobs,  Un- 
dine, The  Martyrs  of  Spain,  Shakespeare,  and  Dick- 
ens. She  has  always  been  interested  in  educational 
affairs,  and  was  above  all  others  responsible  for  the  or- 
ganization in  this  country  of  free  kindergartens  for 
poor  children.  But  one  needs  now-a-days  only  to  refer 
to  A  Cathedral  Courtship,  The  Birds'  Christmas  Carol, 
Polly  Oliver's  Problem,  Timothy's  Quest,  Penelope's 
Experience  (carried  through  three  books),  and  Re- 
becca of  Sunnybrook  Farm  to  be  sure  of  delighted 
attention  from  admiring  readers.  But  The  Old  Pea- 
body  Pew  is  a  story  of  more  rare  beauty  than  these. 

Stories  of  college  life  seldom  have  merit.  Students 
themselves  are  not,  as  a  rule,  sufficiently  matured  in 
the  craft  of  writing  to  produce  superior  stylistic  form, 
though  they  are  astonishingly  fertile  in  fancy  and  in 
strong,  if  crude,  imagination.  An  occasional  excep- 
tion serves  only  to  prove  the  rule.  The  practised 
writer,  on  the  other  hand,  has  shunned  the  field,  or  has 
been  so  smitten  with  the  glamour  of  it  within  his  mem- 
ory that  he  does  it  the  injustice  of  extravagant  exag- 


—  45  — 

geration,  though  college  life  has  formed  an  impor- 
tant feature  of  more  than  one  successful  novel,  (as 
Dorothy  Canfield's  The  Bent  Twig),  when  presented 
as  a  lesser  phase  of  the  careers  of  their  char- 
acters. One  writer,  however,  attained  a  distinct  suc- 
cess in  his  short-story  of  college  life,  Philosophy  Four. 
This  was  Owen  Wister,  who  has  written  also  a  biog- 
raphy of  General  Grant,  and  at  least  three  well-known 
novels,  the  most  tantalizing  of  the  novels  being  Lady 
Baltimore,  which,  by  the  way,  is  the  name  of  a  kind  of 
cake,  not  of  a  woman,  and  was  first  found  in  a  Wom- 
an's Exchange !  Lady  Baltimore  is  Owen  Wister's  trib- 
ute to  Henry  James,  for  only  a  conscious  disciple  of 
James  could  have  written  it;  no  other  sort  of  person 
could  have  done  all  this  verbal  skirmishing,  —  but  the 
verbal  minuets  are  Wister's  own. 

Owen  Wister  during  the  greatest  of  wars  has  served 
well  his  country  by  his  Pentecost  of  Calamity.  But 
the  one  book  which  caught  the  popular  favor  most  se- 
curely is  the  story  of  a  Wyoming  cow-boy,  told  in  his 
novel  of  The  Virginian.  It  is  a  delightful  story,  one 
we  would  fain  believe  true.  And  it  is  a  picture  of  life, 
a  life  that  has  gone  forever,  but  a  life  that  was  none 
the  less  important  and  interesting  because  it  was 
doomed  to  go,  standing,  as  it  did,  in  the  path  of  prog- 
ress, —  the  life  of  the  cow-puncher,  "the  last  roman- 
tic figure  on  our  soil,"  as  Wister  himself  has  called 
him.  The  center  of  this  picture,  or  of  this  tale  of  sun- 
dry adventures,  is  Cheyenne,  Wyoming;  but  its  soul 
is  the  heaven-born  imagination  of  its  author.  One 
who  has  read  chapters  thirteen  to  sixteen  will  not 
forget  them.     And  one  who  is  old  enough  and  has. 


Phillips 


-46- 

wandered  enough  to  have  come  into  the  company  of 
the  cow-boys  of  the  last  century  re-lives  the  entrancing 
days  which  were  passed  in  their  presence.  This  is  the 
kind  of  story  the  author  could  not  help  telling,  because 
he  saw  its  like  in  life  itself.  There  remain  few  who 
can  record  similar  things ;  and  when  the  social  history 
of  America  shall  be  written  this  book  will  be  counted 
among  the  authentic  documents. 

Almost  a  score  of  novels  is  our  heritage  from  David 
Graham  Phillips,  who  died  before  the  full  fruition  of 
his  powers.  His  was  pioneer  work,  pioneer  work  in 
that  it  presents,  with  outspoken  fearlessness,  Ameri- 
can life  of  to-day  as  seen  directly  by  one  whose  ideal 
was  the  truth  about  the  liabilities,  not  the  assets,  of 
the  social  life  of  the  conventional  "upper  classes"  of 
this  nation.  No  one  since  Emerson  has  taught  so  strik- 
ingly that  "It  is  as  exact  a  truth  as  any  in  chemistry  or 
mechanics  that  Aristocracy  is  the  natural,  the  inevita- 
ble sequence  of  widespread  ignorance,  and  Democracy 
the  natural,  the  inevitable  sequence  of  widespread  in- 
telligence. -  *  *  *  The  story  of  history,  rightly  writ- 
ten, would  be  the  story  of  the  march  of  Democracy, 
now  patiently  wearing  away  obstacles,  accelerated 
there,  now  sweeping  along  upon  the  surface,  again 
flowing  for  centuries  underground,  but  always  in  ac- 
tion, always  the  one  continuous,  inevitable  force.  There 
has  never  been  any  more  danger  of  its  defeat  than 
there  has  been  danger  that  the  human  brain  would  be 
smoothed  of  its  thought-bearing  convolutions  and  set 
in  retreat  through  the  stages  of  evolution  back  to  pro- 
toplasm."    . 


—  47  — 

Phillips  was  a  reporter  for  the  New  York  Sun,  then 
London  correspondent  for  the  New  York  World.  He 
also  devoted  himself  to  what  were  termed  "muck-rak- 
ing" articles  for  magazines ;  and  then  came  his  novels. 
He  was  an  untiring  workman.  He  said,  "Every  one 
of  my  books  was  written  at  least  three  times  *  *  * 
and  when  I  say  'three  times'  it  really  means  nine  times, 
on  account  of  my  system  of  copying  and  revision  *  * 
*  *  I  have  writer's  cramp  every  spring."  He  wrote 
for  hours  at  a  time,  standing  at  a  desk,  usually  during 
the  night,  turning  out  from  six  thousand  to  seven 
thousand  words  between  ten  o'clock  and  daylight.  His 
nearly  twenty  novels  averaged  at  least  one  hundred 
thousand  words.  Back  of  this  industry  were  his  in- 
tense moral  earnestness,  his  eagerness  for  reform,  and 
his  belief  that  "the  matter  of  giving  life  to  the  pages 
of  a  novel  is  the  result  of  industrious  study  of  human 
beings."  There  is  an  important  principle  underlying 
each  one  of  his  books,  —  such  a  principle  as  the  bio- 
logical one  that  man,  as  other  animals,  makes  his  best 
records  under  handicaps,  or  the  social  principle  that 
the  family  is  the  unit  of  happiness. 

His  books  are  almost  among  the  great  books  of  the 
time  —  The  Great  God  Success,  The  Second  Genera- 
tion, Light-Fingered  Gentry,  Old  Wives  for  New,  The 
Hungry  Heart,  The  Husband's  Story,  and  The  Grain 
of  Dust,  to  name  only  the  best  of  them.  No  man,  not 
even  Carlyle,  has  ever  shown  more  depth  of  hatred  for 
shams  than  did  David  Graham  Phillips.  The  unmask- 
ing of  political  and  social  shams  was  his  mission,  the 
"showing  up"  especially  of  the  life  of  the  "yellow 
rich;"  and  through  all  of  his  efforts  to  do  this  runs  a 


-48- 

passionate  advocacy  of  the  Americanism  which  de- 
mands a  working  belief  that  civilization  does  not  mean 
property  but  means  men  and  women.  Yet  in  all  the 
diseases  of  the  American  body  politic  and  social,  with 
his  characteristically  American  optimism  he  saw  the 
sign  of  vitality.  He  believed  in  the  curative  power  of 
illness.  He  was  a  "prophet  of  twentieth  century  un- 
rest and  reconstruction/'  a  radical  prophet,  one  "out 
for  results." 

All  critics  seem  to  agree  that  The  Second  Genera- 
tion is  the  story  with  which  to  begin  the  reading  of 
Phillips,  as  it  is  less  likely  than  any  other  to  arouse 
needless  antagonism.  This  is  a  significant  and  inspiring 
story,  —  all  agree  to  that,  too.  Yet  the  character  draw- 
ing of  Dorothy  Hallowell  in  The  Grain  of  Dust  is  the 
most  faithful  to  life  of  any  of  his  portraits  of  the 
women  of  to-day,  accurate  as  they  all  are.  One  reading 
the  delineation  of  Dorothy  Hallowell  inevitably  recurs 
in  his  mind  to  the  marvelous  picturing  done  by  Thack- 
eray and  by  Balzac.  And  one  knows  the  author  as  he 
reads  the  book.  If  strongly  energetic  yet  unconsciously 
delicate  revelation  of  the  personality  of  the  author  con- 
stitutes literature,  then  The  Grain  of  Dust  is  literature, 
and  of  a  high  order. 
22SflSr  The  leading  function  of  William  Allen  White,  a 
Kansas  newspaper  editor,  has  been  the  popular  pre- 
sentation of  sound  political  principles  through  the  me- 
dium of  magazine  articles,  but  he  has  also  written 
many  short-stories  and  one  very  remarkable  novel. 
A  visit  to  France  in  191 7  resulted  in  a  volume 
under  the  title  of  The  Martial  Adventures  of 
Henry  and  Me,  giving  an  illuminating  account  of  what 


Kansas?' 


—  49  — 

he  saw  and  thought  there.  This  book,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  Dawson's  Carry  On,  shows  the  hand  of  the 
master  of  a  literary  style  more  than  any  of  the  numer- 
ous war-books  published  before  19 18.  The  "eloquent 
chronicler"  of  this  history-making  time  does  not  ap- 
pear as  yet  to  have  revealed  himself.  Among  White's 
ten  or  a  dozen  publications  in  book  form,  one  at  least 
will  be  considered  by  the  future  historian  of  American 
social  life  as  a  document  of  highest  value.  The  story  of 
John  Barclay  in  A  Certain  Rich  Man  is  the  story  of 
American  life  on  the  western  plains  beginning  in  1857, 
when  Kansas  was  frontier,  and  ending  in  1909  when 
the  frontier  could  be  found  nowhere  unless  perhaps 
in  our  Asiatic  islands.  Strong  types  and  sharply  out- 
lined individuals  are  in  this  great  novel,  as  well  as  so- 
cial and  political  and  business  background,  and  the 
author  writes  as  one  who  has  much  to  say  and  all  is 
important.     Few  books  are  more  persuasive. 

Frank  Norris,  though  born  in  Chicago,  was  taken  by  The  man  who 
his  emigrating  family  to  California  so  early  in  his  life  "The  Great 
that  the  greater  impressions   which   embodied  them-   Novel" 
selves  in  his  novels  were  derived  from  the  life  of  the 
west  coast.     Norris  was  trained  in  a  newspaper  office, 
writing  thus,  he  said,   for  the  Plain  People.     In  his 
early  fiction  he  showed  the  influence  of  Stevenson  in 
Moran  of  the  Lady  Letty   (his  one  purely  romantic 
book)  and  the  influence  of  Zola  in  McTeague  (a  study 
in  heredity  and  environment  which  took  four  years  to 
write).  But  Norris  never  in  his  work  nor  in  his  thought 
about  his  work  quite  distinguished  between  the  chief 
methods  of  these  two  masters.    "For  my  own  part,"  he 
said  (and  he  wrote  fiction  accordingly),  "I  believe  that 


—  50  — 

the  greatest  realism  is  the  greatest  romanticism,  and  I 
hope  some  day  to  prove  it."  Norris  wrote  realisti- 
cally, though  not  because  he  wanted  to  be  a  realist,  as 
Zola  did,  but  because  he  wanted  to  make  evident  to  all 
hL  readers  the  significance  of  the  real,  for,  said  he,  1 
"Literature  is  of  all  the  arts  the  most  democratic." 

Like  David  Graham  Phillips,  Norris  was  a  pioneer 
in  twentieth  century  literature,  because,  for  one  thing, 
he  believed  that  the  novel  is  something  essential  to 
modern  civilization,  —  "Essential,"  he  said,  "because 
it  expresses  modern  life  better  than  architecture,  bet- 
ter than  painting,  better  than  poetry,  better  than  music. 
It  is  as  necessary  to  the  civilization  of  the  twentieth 
century  as  the  violin  is  to  Kubelik,  as  the  piano  is  to 
Paderewski  *  *  *  *  It  is  an  instrument,  a  tool,  a 
weapon,  a  vehicle.  It  is  that  thing  which  in  the  hand 
of  a  man  makes  him  civilized  and  no  longer  a  savage, 
because  it  gives  him  a  power  of  durable,  permanent 
expression."  The  effect  of  such  ideas  as  these,  and  of 
the  work  done  in  accordance  with  such  ideas,  partic- 
ularly of  the  fine  craftsmanship  of  that  work,  has 
been  almost  immeasurably  great,  not  only  upon  the 
younger  generation  of  novelists,  but  upon  the  older 
workers  who  have  survived  him. 

Norris  maintained  that  the  novel  is  a  greater 
moulder  of  public  opinion  and  of  public  morals  than 
is  the  press.  "The  press  is  read  with  lightning  haste, 
and  the  morning  news  is  waste  paper  by  noon.  But 
the  novel  goes  into  the  home  to  stay.  It  is  read  word 
for  word ;  is  talked  about,  discussed ;  its  influence  pen- 
etrates every  chink  and  corner  of  the  family."  But 
while  Norris  wrote  for  the  people,  he  did  not  write  for 


—  5i  — 

popularity.  He  never  truckled ;  never  took  off  his  hat 
to  fashion  and  held  it  out  for  pennies.  He  was  a  real- 
ist for  the  sole  reason  that  he  believed  it  essential  that 
people,  "the  People,"  hear,  not  a  lie,  but  the  truth,  and 
that  they  should  understand  that  truth. 

Norris's  aim  was  to  write  in  prose  fiction  form  the 
epic  of  our  present  national  life.  He  planned  three 
volumes  for  this  purpose :  The  Octopus;  The  Pit;  and 
a  third,  which  was  to  have  been  named  The  Wolf, 
but  which  never  saw  the  light,  for  he  died  at  the 
age  of  thirty-seven,  before  he  was  able  to  put  his  plan 
into  form.  Wheat  is  the  symbol  of  American  life  h 
these  two  volumes,  as  gold  is  in  McTeague.  The  Octo- 
pus is  the  epic  tale  of  the  early  western  railroad,  the 
road  that  brooked  no  competition,  that  fed  upon  the  la- 
bor of  men,  destroying  them,  and  yet  feeding  the  world 
with  the  Titan  wheat  harvests  of  California  valleys. 
All  the  "baseness  and  the  grandeur,  the  sensuality  and 
the  spirituality"  which  accompany  these  gigantic  ope- 
rations is  almost  brutally  set  forth.  Through  "the  in- 
iquitous burden  of  extortionate  freight  rates,  imposed 
like  a  yoke  of  iron"  the  railroad  prevailed.  "Men  — 
motes  in  the  sunshine  perished  *  *  *  *  But  the 
wheat  remained''  The  Pit  is  the  story  of  Chicago 
wheat  traders  and  trading,  inferior  in  "strength  and 
brilliancy  and  lyric  quality,"  as  it  is  inferior  in  subject 
matter,  to  The  Octopus,  yet  it  has  been  more  widely 
read,  for  the  obvious  if  not  very  commendable  reason 
that  in  The  Pit  men  and  women  are  more  every-day 
and  like  unto  our  too  conventional  selves.  As  a  great 
allegory   The   Octopus,  though   not  worthy   of   being 


—  52  — 

styled  the  great  American  novel,  is  yet  a  landmark,  a 
sign-post,  on  the  way  to  that  yearned-for  achievement. 
One  of  the  most  conscientious  and  assiduous  of 
Churchill  workers  in  the  realm  of  the  novel  is  Winston  Church- 
ill. He  has  spent  three  or  four  years  upon  almost 
every  one  of  his  books.  Thackeray  is  his  model ;  ap- 
parently his  ambition  has  been  to  rise  to  the  mid-Vic- 
torian height,  though  he  is  not  at  all  likely  now  to 
reach  it.  His  books  in  most  instances  are  panoramic 
in  scope,  attempting  surveys  of  large  phases  of  Amer-  \ 
ican  life.  Richard  Carvel,  The  Crossing,  The  Crisis, 
Coniston,  The  Inside  of  the  Cup,  are  cases  in  point. 
The  first  three  are  historical  novels,  dealing,  the  first 
with  the  period  of  the  War  for  Independence,  the 
second  with  the  period  of  the  settling  of  the  Middle 
West,  and  the  third  with  the  period  of  the  Civil  War, 
or  shall  we  call  it  "the  war  for  Southern  independ- 
ence?" The  Crisis  has  been  praised  for  its  sketch  of 
Lincoln,  but  surviving  friends  of  the  g^eat  President 
have  asserted  that  the  picture  is  very  inadequate.  The 
Inside  of  the  Cup  aroused  much  interest  in  its  fear- 
less arraignment  of  modern  ecclesiastical  religion,  and 
for  the  moment  gave  its  author  undeserved  reputation 
for  profound  religious  insight.  But  the  thought  of  the 
book  was  not  constructed  upon  any  new  lines  at  all, 
and,  as  this  fact  became  evident,  interest  soon  waned. 
The  best,  the  most  graphically  vigorous  narrative  of 
them  all,  is  Coniston,  the  story  of  Jethro  Bass,  a  New 
Hampshire  political  boss.  If  it  has  been  less  popular 
than  The  Crisis,  this  is  the  fault  of  the  public  and  not 
of  the  author  nor  of  his  book.    Mr.  Churchill  has  been 


—  53  — 

more  rapid  in  production  of  late,  and  his  quality  has 
fallen  away  correspondingly. 

Anne  Douglas  Sedgwick  (since  1908  Mrs.  de  Selin-  Sedgwick 
court)  has  published  at  least  seven  volumes,  one  of 
which,  Tante,  has  been  widely  circulated.  Her  latest 
volume  is  The  Encounter,  and  is  worthy  of  a  larger 
audience  than  it  has  secured.  It  is  of  especial  interest 
because,  and  perhaps  solely  because,  it  contains  an  in- 
timate study  of  the  personal  side  of  the  life  of  the 
German  philosopher,  Nietzsche.  The  picture  here 
drawn  of  the  much  condemned  thinker  is  not  a  repul- 
sive one,  but  rather  belittling.  There  are  other  char- 
acters in  The  Encounter  who  are  well  delineated,  and 
the  intricacies  of  the  story  are  unforgetable.  The  book 
is  not  designed  to  attract  a  large  number  of  readers. 
Its  crudeness  of  structure,  especially  in  details,  makes 
it  somewhat  difficult  to  the  average  book-lover,  and 
annoying  to  the  more  trained  one.  Still,  that  Mrs.  de 
Selincourt  fails  to  write,  or  refuses  to  write,  after  the 
manner  of  the  general  pattern  of  those  who  write  fic- 
tion, does  not  by  any  means  offset  the  usefulness  of 
the  attempt  to  induct  the  novel-reading  public  into  the 
intimacies  of  the  life  of  the  world-troubling  philoso- 
pher of  world-banned  Prussia. 

The  woman  novelist  of  the  South  is  Miss  Ellen  Glas-  Glase°* 
gow,  who  was  born  at  Richmond,  Virginia,  in  1874. 
With  one  exception  her  novels  depict,  by  the  epic 
method,  the  scenes  and  characters  of  the  region  with 
which  life  has  made  her  familiar.  That  exception  is 
The  Wheel  of  Life,  whose  scene  is  in  New  York, 
and  is  practically  a  failure.  Her  other  books  fall 
into  three  groups,  all  of  the  groups  held  together  as 


—  54  — 

one,  however,  by  a  common  theme,  that  of  marriage 
among  different  social  "classes."  The  first  group  com- 
prises two  books,  The  Battle-Ground  and  The  Deliver- 
ance; the  second,  also  two,  The  Voice  of  the  People 
and  The  Romance  of  a  Plain  Man,  and  in  the  third 
group  one  volume  stands  thus  far  alone,  and  is  by  far 
the  best  of  the  results  of  her  masterly  labors,  —  The 
Miller  of  Old  Church. 

These  books  are  epical,  like  most  of  those  of  Norris 
and  of  Phillips,  for  they  present  as  background  and 
leading  element  of  their  content  the  life  of  a  large  com- 
munity (of  Virginia,  or,  at  most,  the  "New  South"), 
and  then  proceed  to  delineate  the  history  of  one  or 
more  families,  and  within  these  families  the  intimate 
personal  careers  of  one  or  more  individuals  who  are  the 
most  typical  or  symbolic  of  some  aspects  of  the  life 
of  the  large  community  involved.  The  Battle-Ground 
and  The  Deliverance  are  concerned  respectively  with 
the  life  of  Virginia  during  the  Civil  War  and  the 
period  of  Reconstruction.  The  Voice  of  the  People 
and  The  Romance  of  a  Plain  Man  offer  pictures  of  the 
rise,  after  the  war,  of  the  former  white  tillers  of  the 
soil,  if  not,  indeed,  the  "poor  white  trash,"  and  their 
assimilation  or  amalgamation  with  the  impoverished 
"aristocrats"  who  in  the  time  of  distress  find  the 
noble  qualities  of  the  lower  class  not  latent  only  but 
afire  with  ambition  and  with  recognized  achievement 
now  that  opportunity  has  ceased  to  pass  them  by.  Next 
to  The  Miller  of  Old  Church,  Miss  Glasgow's  most 
lasting  triumph  is  The  Romance  of  a  Plain  Man.  It  is 
a  closer  and  finer  and  stronger  study  of  the  inner  de- 
velopment of  individual  character  through  a  process 


—  55  — 

of  self-education  than  any  found  in  the  two  books  of 
the  first  group  or  in  the  first  book  of  the  second ;  and 
it  is  a  superb  piece  of  story-building.  However,  it  is 
not  so  likely  to  be  closely  examined  by  the  social  stu- 
dents of  the  future  as  are  the  books  portraying  the  life 
of  War  and  Reconstruction  days.  Those  "novels  of 
manners,"  as  also  The  Voice  of  the  People,  bring  for- 
ward more  fully  the  circumstances  of  a  society  that  is 
passing  or  has  passed  permanently  away.  Mr.  Frederic 
Cooper  is  right  in  giving  Ellen  Glasgow  the  distinc- 
tion of  being  the  second  American  woman  to  succeed 
in  writing  a  genuine  epic  novel,  the  first  being,  of 
course,  Mrs.  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe. 

*  The  literary  principle  of  illustrating  the  universal 
through  the  particular  is  admirably  exemplified  by  The 
Miller  of  Old  Church,  even  though  the  setting  is  but 
the  neighborhood  of  a  little  country  community,  old- 
fashionedly  named  Old  Church.  In  the  theme  lies  the 
universal  element  of  this  novel,  —  the  struggle  of  the 
"lower  classes"  to  forge  upward,  as  they  everywhere 
have  done  and  continue  to  do.  Yet  the  author  also  well 
meets  in  this  book  the  demand  of  Frank  Norris  that, 
while  the  theme  or  purpose  of  a  novel  is  to  the  story 
as  the  key-note  is  to  a  sonata,  yet  with  the  author  of  the 
novel  as  with  the  musician  the  leading  interest  must  not 
be  the  theme,  not  the  key-note,  but  the  story.  And  it  is 
the  human  story,  the  sheer  story  content  and  sequence, 
rather  than  the  working  of  a  great  theme  in  human 
life,  that  makes  this  book  to  us,  as  it  doubtless  was  to 
its  author,  her  chief  contribution  to  our  literature. 

There  have  been  many  other  novelists  since  1890,  — 
Harold  Frederic,  with  his  Damnation  of  Theron  Ware, 


-56- 


Who  Now 
Gives  the 
Greatest 
Promise  ? 


Edward  Noyes  Westcott,  author  of  David  Harum, 
Stewart  Edward  White,  entertaining  writer  of  the 
north  woods  and  of  Arizona  deserts,  and  of  Alaska 
and  Africa,  too,  Paul  Leicester  Ford,  Richard  Hard- 
ing Davis,  Dorothy  Canfield,  Mary  Johnston,  Arthur 
Train,  Henry  Sydnor  Harrison,  Ernest  Poole,  and 
almost  numberless  others,  some  of  whom  should, 
possibly,  not  be  nameless  here.  According  to  George 
Barr  McCutcheon,  John  Fox,  Jr.,  has  written  the  novel 
with  the  best  title  in  all  American  fiction,  —  The  Lit- 
tle Shepherd  of  Kingdom  Come.  The  promise  of  Ern- 
est Poole  appears  greater  than  that  of  any  others  of  the 
younger  authors  of  fiction  at  this  date  (1918),  but 
there  also  appears  the  old  danger  that  he  will  dissipate 
his  gifts  in  over-production.  Or  is  it  Henry  Sydnor 
Harrison  who  gives  the  greater  promise?  His  Queed 
is  a  good  story;  one  can  hardly  wait  for  the  apparent 
tragedy  to  develop  into  comedy,  so  absorbing  is  the 
tale.  He  has  a  finer  hand  than  has  Poole,  and  carries 
on  the  more  obvious  literary  traditions;  there  is,  in 
fact,  a  touch  of  Dickens  in  the  story.  Yet  we  may 
not  be  amiss  if  we  fix  our  faith  upon  neither  of  these, 
but  upon  Dorothy  Canfield  (Mrs.  J.  R.  Fisher).  She 
is  a  better  writer  than  Poole,  both  in  detail  and  in 
plot-construction,  and  she  probes  more  deeply  into  the 
souls  of  her  characters  than  does  Harrison,  —  is  much 
less  superficial  than  he.  The  Bent  Twig  is  a  notable 
success.  The  social  student  cannot  afford  to  pass  by 
Ernest  Poole;  the  student  of  the  "New  South"  (and  of 
the  newspaper  for  that  matter)  cannot  afford  to  leave 
Harrison  unread;  and  in  Dorothy  Canfield  we  at  last 
appear  to  have  an  author  who  understands  the  Col- 


—  57  — 

lege  community,  though  that  is,  perhaps,  the  least  im- 
portant feature  of  her  interesting  book.  The  most  im- 
portant thing  said  in  The  Bent  Tzvig  is  in  Chapter 
XXXI  and  relates  to  elementary  education.  —  "Per- 
haps all  this  modern  ferment  of  what's  known  as  'so- 
cial conscience'  or  'civic  responsibility,'  isn't  a  result 
of  the  sense  of  duty,  but  of  the  old,  old  craving  for 
beauty."  And  who  has  better  stated  the  actual  func- 
tion of  our  public  school  than  Dorothy  Canfield  (Chap- 
ter VII)?  —  thus:  "Those  devouringly  active  little 
minds  did  not  spend  six  hours  a  day  in  school  without 
learning  something  incessantly.  The  few  rags  and 
tatters  of  book-information  they  acquired  were  but  the 
merest  fringes  on  the  great  garment  of  learning  ac- 
quired by  these  public  school  children,  which  was  to 
wrap  them  about  all  their  lives.  What  they  learned 
during  those  eight  yeais  of  sitting  still  and  not  whis- 
pering had  nothing  to  do  with  the  books  in  their  desks 
or  the  lore  in  their  teachers'  brains.  The  great  im- 
pression stamped  upon  the  wax  of  their  minds,  which 
became  iron  in  after  years,  was  democracy — " 

Our  sketch  would  be  sadly  more  incomplete  than  it 
now  is,  if  we  did  not  mention  two  other  works  of  fic- 
tion. H.  K.  Viele's  The  Inn  of  the  Silver  Moon  is 
one  of  the  most  charming  of  foolish  stories,  high  ro- 
mance walking  in  the  midst  of  familiar  matter  of  to- 
day, a  miracle  of  rare  device;  its  author  certainly  on 
honey-dew  hath  fed,  and  drunk  the  milk  of  Paradise ! 
The  Inn  of  the  Silver  Moon  is  only  a  novelette,  per- 
haps ;  but  this  cannot  be  -said  of  Charles  D.  Stewart's 
Partners  of  Providence,  a  real  novel,  rich  with  humor, 
astonishing  for  the  keenness  and  breadth  of  its  insight 


-58- 

and  understanding,  such  a  book  as  the  world  has 
waited  for  ever  since  Mark  Twain's  stories  of  river 
life.  The  book  has  come,  and  it  is  better  than  the 
world  expected,  for  it  is  not  an  imitation  of  Mark 
Twain.  It  is  an  independent  book,  intensely  interest- 
ing, immensely  entertaining,  —  the  kind  of  book  that 
makes  one  feel  that  he  knows  man  and  the  world  bet- 
ter, and  that  acquiring  the  knowledge  has  been  tre- 
mendously worth  while. 


Is  it 


III 

THE  DRAMATISTS 

The  American  Stage. —  It  takes  the  critic  to  his 
wits'  end  to  be  sure  that  he  is  placing  an  unprejudiced 
estimate  upon  the  printed  plays  of  America.  In  brief,  American? 
such  an  estimate  would  probably  be  that,  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  box  office  American  drama  has 
been  a  matchless  success,  but  that  as  literature  it  has 
been  embarrassingly  inconsiderable.  We  have  had 
many  excellent  playwrights,  men  who  have  known  how 
to  lay  out  thrilling  and  yet  consistent  plots  and  who 
have  been  able  to  manage  the  tactical  details  of  play 
presentation. almost  to  perfection.  Bronson  Howard, 
Clyde  Fitch,  William  Gillette,  Charles  Klein,  George 
H.  Broadhurst,  Augustus  Thomas,  Langdon  Mitchell, 
David  Belasco,  George  M.  Cohan,  —  and  there  have 
been  and  are  more.  Among  them  Mr.  Cohan  is  con- 
sidered foremost  as  a  maker  of  plays  for  the  stage; 
but  how  far  from  the  kingdom  of  letters !  It  is,  in 
fact,  doubtful  whether  a  single  play  from  the  hand  of 
any  one  of  these  men  will  be  appraised  as  literature  a 
.  half  century  hence,  the  doubt  arising  only  because 
Fitch's  Beau  Brummel,  Thomas's  The  Witching  Hour, 
and  Mitchell's  The  New  York  Idea  are  still  read, 
even  after  the  likelihood  of  their  frequent  revival  in 
the  theater,  has  vanished.  The  first  of  these  three 
plays  is  a  good  picture  of  an  historical  character  who  is 
still  of  interest ;  the  second  is  a  plea  for  a  semi-popular 
psychic  creed  which  features  mental  telepathy  as  one 
of  its  strongest  points ;  and  the  third  is  our  best  comedy 


—  6o  — 

of  manners.  The  reason  for  so  little  real  drama  from 
this  group  of  playwrights  is  that  they  have  not  studied 
American  life  and  brought  it  before  the  American  peo- 
ple, but  have  given  their  attention  to  a  small  phase  of 
that  life,  the  metropolitan  phase,  and  have  presented 
it  to  cosmopolitans  only.  To  be  more  specific,  they 
have  studied  only  the  life  of  Broadway  and  its  vicinity 
and  have  staged  that  for  New  Yorkers  of  all  nationali- 
ties. Even  though  Clyde  Fitch  wrote  about  sixty-six 
plays  and  Augustus  Thomas  began  a  series  of  plays 
each  to  be  entitled  after  some  one  of  the  Common- 
wealths of  the  Union  (but  getting  no  further  than 
Colorado),  yet  their  characters  talk  and  live  as  the 
inhabitants  of  Manhattan  Island  alone  talk  and  live. 

Literary  Prose  Drama.  —  There  are  a   few  other 
playwrights  who  have  been  more  successful  with  the 
with  Acts    library-table  play;    Mary    Austin,    William    Vaughn 
Many  Moody,  Edward  Sheldon,  Edward  Knoblauch,  Charles 

Kenyon,  Alice  Brown,  Percy  Mackaye,  George  Mid- 
dleton,  and  we  might  now  include  Charles  Rann  Ken- 
nedy, as  he  has  taken  steps  toward  naturalization  since 
the  entrance  of  our  country  upon  the  duties  of  the 
Great  War.  David  Pinski,  also,  a  Russian  dramatist, 
author  of  The  Treasure,  appears  to  have  begun  the 
process  of  Americanization,  and,  if  he  continues  it, 
will  be  eagerly  claimed  by  us.  All  these  have  written 
plays  of  undoubted  power  and  sincerity,  not  only  in 
subject  matter  but  also  in  manner  of  treatment,  — 
and  it  is  by  treatment  of  his  material,  of  course,  that 
the  artist  stands  or  falls.  And  then  we  cannot  over- 
look at  least  four  writers  of  poetic  drama,  Josephine 
Preston  Peabody   (Mrs.  Lionel  Marks),   Mrs.   Olive 


—  61  — 

Til  ford  Dargan,  Richard  Hovey,  and  William  Vaughn 
Moody. 

Mary  Austin,  William  Vaughn  Moody,  and  Edward 
Sheldon  have  done  with  the  drama  what  many  of  our 
short-stories  have  excelled  in  doing,  namely,  created  a 
literature  "of  the  soil."  Mary  Austin's  The  Arrow 
Maker  is  a  play  with  a  setting  of  western  mountains 
and  the  tribal  vicissitudes  of  the  native  Indians.  It  is 
true  that  the  play  does  reveal  the  universal  longing  of 
Woman  to  have  and  to  serve,  but  that  it  is  a  play  dis- 
tinctively American  is,  in  this  instance,  more  impor- 
tant. Plays  a-plenty  with  material  immensely  vary- 
ing from  the  material  of  this  one  have  exhibited  the 
same  universal  quality ;  but  this  material  could  have 
been  found  only  upon  our  soil.  Moody's  The  Great  Di- 
vide and  Sheldon's  The  Nigger  are  far  more  of  the 
United  States  than  is  Zangwill's  much  praised  The 
Melting-Pot.  Moody's  play  represents  setting  and 
events  in  the  Southwest,  though  there  is  much  of  New 
England  in  it,  too,  and  Sheldon's  represents  setting  and 
events  in  the  Southeast,  and  all  impossible  elsewhere. 
But  another  prose  play  by  Moody,  The  Faith-Healer, 
though  less  read  because  of  its  minimum  of  purely 
sensational  appeal,  is  much  superior  to  The  Great  Di- 
vide. Mr.  William  Archer,  the  distinguished  English 
dramatic  critic,  has  spoken  of  The  Faith-Healer  as  the 
only  American  play  of  real  psychological  importance. 

Edward  Knoblauch's  most  successful  experiment  has 
been  done  in  collaboration  with  Arnold  Bennett,  Eng- 
lish playwright,  essayist,  and  novelist,  upon  the  drama 
entitled  Milestones.  This  drama  is  famous  as  a  unique 
experiment    in    technique,    the    authors    carrying    one 


—   62    — 

theme  through  the  action  and  character  revealment  of 
three  generations  of  one  family,  and  doing  it  success- 
fully, to  the  final  confusion  of  the  ancient  dogma  of 
the  unity  of  time.  The  theme  of  this  play  could  hardly 
be  older,  that  human  nature  is  the  same  yesterday,  to- 
day, and  tomorrow.  Charles  Kenyon's  Kindling  has 
excited  great  interest  among  students  of  social  condi- 
tions. It  is  an  over-idealized  bit  of  work  in  its 
characterization,  and  is  lacking  in  symmetry  and 
proper  emphasis  of  detail;  yet  it  is  strongly  to  be  com- 
mended for  its  restraint  in  sentiment.  Miss  -Alice 
Brown's  Children  of  the  Barth,  a  ten  thousand  dollar 
prize  play,  is  an  extraordinary  study  in  many  things 
that  may  be  found  in  our  national  life  if  one  will  but 
turn  his  mind  and  eyes  away  from  the  great  cities.  The 
play  has  not  been  convincing  to  many  readers  of  pres- 
ent-day drama,  only  because  it  is  difficult  for  them  to 
understand,  much  less  to  see  for  themselves,  that  there 
can  be  so  great  and  so  profound  complexity  of  life  in 
"the  provinces."  Some  parts  of  this  play  are  among 
the  most  ethereally  beautiful  passages  in  our  litera- 
ture, as  we  might  expect  from  so  accomplished  a 
writer  as  Miss  Brown. 

The  work  of  Percy  Mackaye  and  of  George  Middle- 
ton  takes  us  into  the  purlieus  of  that  fine  body  of   litera- 
The  One-act ture  composed  of  one-act  plays,  so  popular  upon  the  Eu- 
Play  ropean  stage  and  so  unfailingly  attractive  to  the  reader 

everywhere  because  of  the  perfection  of  dialogue  and 
of  structure  from  the  hands  of  the  greatest  of  the  old- 
world  dramatists  of  the  past  forty  years.  An  occa- 
sional one-act  play  can  be  found  here  and  there  in  the 
history  of  literature  for  many  a  year  before  the  pres- 


—  63- 

ent  time,  but  it  was  not  deemed  specially  important 
until  the  remarkable  work  of  August  Strindberg,  the 
Swedish  dramatist,  gave  it  vogue  in  his  thirteen  di- 
minutive dramas,  or  one-act  plays.  Strindberg  was 
quickly  followed  in  this  relatively  new  literary  form 
by  Sudermann,  Hofmansthal,  and  Maeterlinck  upon 
the  continent  of  Europe,  and  by  William  Sharp,  Bern- 
ard Shaw,  Stephen  Phillips,  James  M.  Barrie,  Lord 
Dunsany,  Lady  Gregory,  Yeats,  Synge,  Robinson, 
Masefield,  Gibson,  Phillpotts,  and  many  others  in  the 
British  Isles,  and  the  one-act  play,  neither  a  drama- 
tized short-story  nor  a  compressed  drama  of  the  older 
type,  but  a  distinct  literary  type,  had  come  to  remain. 
Numberless  one-act  plays  have  been  written  in 
America  of  late  years,  and  to  select  two  or  three  au- 
thors as  representative  of  the  many  who  have  writ- 
ten them  is  to  be  almost  certain  to  reject  others  as 
worthy.  Miss  Marguerite  Merington  and  Mrs.  Evelyn 
Greenleaf  Sutherland  have  won  high  reputation  by 
their  volumes  of  one-act  plays.  The  Picture-Plays  of 
Miss  Merington  make  one  of  the  cleverest  of  volumes 
of  recent  days.  But  Percy  Mackaye  and  George  Mid- 
dleton  are  more  worthy  of  notice,  and  not  of  that 
alone,  but  of  careful  study,  though  Mr.  Mackaye  does 
insist  that  it  takes  less  effort  to  write  ten  one-act  plays 
than  one  longer  drama,  — ■  which  is  extremely  doubt- 
ful, if  the  one-act  play  be  as  good  as  the  best.  Percy 
Mackaye's  one-act  plays  in  Yankee  Fantasies  are  as 
likely,  if  not  more  than  likely,  to  last  as  long  as  his 
loosely  constructed  and  over-ornamented  longer  plays. 
Mackaye  has  a  wide  vocabulary  and  is  a  past  master 
at  phrasing,  but  he  has  not  a  great  deal  of  dramatic 


-64- 

power.  But  The  Yankee  Fantasies  are  good  in  char- 
acter presentation,  really  convincing  as  New  England 
types,  strictly  and  peculiarly  American,  almost  actual 
individuals,  though  of  rather  eccentric  sorts.  They 
are  not  at  all  over-done,  as  his  ambitious  interpreta- 
tion of  early  New  England  character  in  The  Scare- 
crow certainly  is  over-done ;  and  to  one  unacquainted 
with  the  real  literature  in  the  form  of  the  one-act  play 
they  afford  a  delightful  open  door  to  such  pleasing 
and  important  acquaintanceship. 

George  Middleton  is  our  most  accomplished  writer 
in  this  particular  form.  His  Embers,  and  Other 
One- Act  Plays  contains  his  ablest  work.  They  are 
serious  plays,  "studies  in  consequences  and  readjust- 
ments," he  has  called  them,  further  expressions  of 
some  preceding  situations.  They  suggest  that  other 
dramatic  situations  have  come  before  them  and  have 
led  up  to  them,  and  that  further  dramatic,  even  tragic, 
situations  would  follow,  if  these  playlets  were  actual 
life,  as  they  seem  almost  to  be.  And  this  is  the  true 
art  of  the  one-act  play,  that  it  is  unitary  in  its  effect, 
but,  like  conditions  and  situations  in  life,  suggestive  of 
what  is  never  told. 

Another  successful  writer  of  one-act  plays  is  Per- 
cival  Wilde.  He  has  published  three  volumes  of  brief 
dramatic  pieces,  the  most  read  of  them  being  Dawn 
and  Other  One-Act  Plays  of  Life  To-day  and  The 
Unseen  Host  and  Other  War  Plays.  The  title  piece 
in  the  second  of  these  volumes  is  based  upon  the  inci- 
dent of  the  Angels  of  Mons.  More  of  Mr.  Wilde's 
one-act  plays  are  said  to  have  been  produced  in  "Lit- 
tle Theatres"  than  those  of  any  other  American  author. 


II 

POETRY 


II 

POETRY 


Poetic  Drama.  —  There  has  been  considerable  hos- 
tile criticism  of  the  poetic  drama;  usually,  though,  by  The  Poetic 
authors  who  cannot  produce  anything  poetic  or  by  drama 
critics  who  know  neither  poetry  nor  the  drama.  The 
criticism  has  nearly  always  taken  the  form  of  saying 
that  the  poetic  drama  is  not  realistic  and  cannot  be. 
But  there  is  no  essential  difference  between  realistic 
and  poetic  drama.  If  poetry  has  been  correctly  de- 
fined when  defined  as  passion  of  the  soul,  then  many 
a  realistic  drama,  whether  written  in  prose  or  in  verse, 
is  packed  with  poetry;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  if  the 
abiding  characteristics  of  the  human  mind  and  heart 
abide  because  they  are  real,  then  many  a  poetic  play 
is  realistic.  Many  a  poetic  play  contains  world-old 
aspects  of  our  frail  yet  strong,  failing  yet  aspiring  and 
achieving,  human  nature.  There  is  much  of  this  uni- 
versally and  abidingly  real  content  of  human  life  in 
Josephine  Preston  Peabody's  The  Piper  and  in  her  ^'^j18 
Marlowe.  Marlowe  is  an  attempt  to  rehabilitate  the  Peabody 
life  of  the  Shakespeareans,  and  centers  about  Christo- 
pher Marlowe's  song  beginning  "Come  live  with  me, 
and  be  my  Love."  It  is  for  the  reader  who  is 
already  equipped  with  a  sense  for  the  historic  and 
for  the  force  of  allusion;  it  is  not,  perhaps,  read- 
ily "understanded  of  the  people."     But  The  Piper  is 


—  68  — 

for  everybody,  a  simple  and  beautiful  and  world-wide 
application  of  the  theme  underlying  the  folk  tale  al- 
ready so  well  told  by  Browning,  the  theme  that  not 
gold  but  love  will  purchase  the  precious  things  that  we 
have  once  driven  away  from  us  by  base  selfishness  and 
false  promises.  This  author  has  written  other  books 
and  dramas,  but  The  Piper  placed  her  high  among 
American  poets  and  among  playwrights  of  every- 
where. We  shall  elsewhere  have  occasion  to  discuss 
her  as  poet. 
Dargan1  °r  Mrs.  Olive  Tilford  Dargan,  another  author  of  poetic 
drama,  appears,  as  George  Eliot  did,  to  crave  to  live  in 
her  mind  a  universal  life.  She  has  made  her  knowl- 
edge almost  engirdle  the  world,  and  has  reflected  this 
unusual  breadth  of  learning  in  her  dramas.  The  ancient 
life  of  Mesopotamia;  the  life  of  Greece  in  the  days  of 
her  struggles  with  the  Persian,  in  her  colonial  era,  and 
during  the  Crusades  of  mediaeval  days;  life  in  Cen- 
tral America,  in  Spain,  in  Russia,  in  middle-age  Eng- 
land, in  the  United  States,  and  in  idealized  times  and 
places ;  —  all  these  have  yielded  settings,  background, 
atmosphere,  and  content  for  her  numerous  plays.  All 
her  plays  are  good,  with  the  exception  of  the  one 
prose  play  called  The  Poet,  which  is  so  poor  that  it 
should  never  have  been  printed.  The  strongest  among 
them  in  point  of  mystery  of  life  and  of  her  art  are 
Semiramis,  Lords  and  Lovers,  The  Siege,  The  Mor- 
tal Gods,  and  The  Shepherd.  Mrs.  Dargan  imitates 
the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  a  most  daring  thing  to  do. 
But  she  has  excellent  historical  insight  and  imagina- 
tion, is  a  good  story-teller,  and,  at  times,  writes  poetry 
of  very  nearly  transcendent  merit. 


-6g- 

Richard  Hovey  was  the  most  ably  and  finely  equip-  Richard 
ped  of  all  recent  Americans  who  have  attempted  the 
dramatic  form.  His  aim  was  frankly  to  create  poetry 
rather  than  stage  plays.  The  delicately  wrought  dia- 
logue of  his  four  Arthurian  dramas  (he  had  planned 
nine)  is  beyond  the  mouthing  of  the  stage.  In  these 
dramas  Hovey  played  upon  an  instrument  of  many 
strings,  and  this  instrument  speaks  best  to  one  who 
listens  with  the  inner  ear  of  the  soul.  "All  music  is 
what  awakes  from  you  when  you  are  reminded  by  the 
instruments,"  —  true  to  the  last  word  this  is  when 
one  reads  the  dramas  of  Hovey,  for  one  forgets  au- 
thor, subject,  story,  and  the  incomparable  technique  of 
verse  while  the  music  of  many  of  their  passages  takes 
swift  and  complete  possession  of  the  spirit  of  the 
reader.  But  we  shall  revert  in  the  following  pages 
to  this  series  of  dramas,  to  which  Hovey  gave  the  gen- 
eral title  of  Launcclot  and  Guenevere. 

William  Vaughn  Moody's  three  poetic  dramas,  The  ^aillitm 
Firebringer,  The  Death  of  Bve,  and  The  Masque  of  Moody 
Judgment,  must  not  be  over-looked  by  the  student  of 
our  literary  drama.  The  last  named  of  these  is  lofty 
poetry.  While  one  will  not  venture  upon  a  compari- 
son with  the  poetry  of  Milton,  yet  The  Masque  of 
Judgment  inevitably  suggests  the  tone,  the  thought, 
and  the  imaginative  vision  of,  not  Milton's  Comus,  but 
Paradise  Lost. 

Chiefly  Lyrical.  —  If  we  admit  to  the  company  all  A  Goodly 

/        J  ,  ,  .        Fellowship 

who  write  verse,  there  are  in  the  elect  body  of  poets  in 
this  country  more  than  four  hundred,  —  a  good  many 
more.  The  number  who  sit  at  the  banquet  tables  of 
the  Poetry  Society  is,  —  not  quite  legion.     Yet  a  few 


—  70  — 

only  are  feasting  far  up  the  slopes  of  Parnassus.  But 
to  offer  a  selection  of  the  arrived  or  nearly  arrived  few- 
is  to  invite  denunciation  and  harangue. 

However,  no  one  will  be  disposed  to  quarrel  if  we 
say  there  should  be  included  in  such  a  selection  the 
Com?inyioUS  f ollowing :  Eugene  Field,  John  Banister  Tabb,  James 
Whitcomb  Riley,  Edwin  Markham,  George  Edward 
Woodberry,  Richard  Hovey,  Madison  J.  Cawein,  Fred- 
eric Lawrence  Knowles,  Cale  Young  Rice,  Paul  Laur- 
ence Dunbar,  Frank  Dempster  Sherman,  Lloyd  Mifflin, 
Alan  Seeger,  Edith  M.  Thomas,  Lizette  Woodworth 
Reese,  Olive  Til  ford  Dargan,  Josephine  Preston  Pea- 
body,  Anna  Hempstead  Branch,  William  Vaughn 
Moody,  Mary  McNeil  Fenollosa,  and  Gertrude  Hall. 

There  are  others  whose  work  was  so  nearly  com- 
plete before  1890  that  we  omit  them  save  by  name,  — ■ 
Joaquin  Miller,  Phillips  Brooks,  Henry  Cuyler  Bun- 
ner;  and  here  rather  than  in  the  list  above  belongs 
James  Whitcomb  Riley,  too,  excepting  for  a. very  few 
of  his  better  poems.  The  life  of  John  Greenleaf  Whit- 
tier  did  not  come  to  an  end  until  September  7,  1892, 
and  between  1890  and  a  few  weeks  before  his  death 
a  dozen  or  more  poems  of  merit  came  from  his  still 
singing  spirit.  His  last  poem,  written  "at  sundown," 
is  the  verses  to  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  ending,  in  the 
last  two  stanzas,  thus  beautifully  and  in  harmony  with 
the  entire  life  of  their  author,  — 

The  hour  draws  near,  howe'er  delayed  and  late, 
When  at  the  Eternal  Gate 

We  leave  the  words  and  works  we  call  our  own, 
And  lift  void  hands  alone 


—  71  — 

For  love  to  fill.    Our  nakedness  of  soul 
Brings  to  that  Gate  no  toll; 
Giftless  we  come  to  Him,  who  all  things  gives, 
And  live  because  He  lives. 

And  there  are  still  others  who  give  or  have  given 
promise  rather  than,  as  yet,  fulfillment,  among  them 
Clinton  Scollard,  Sara  Teasdale,  Louise  Imogen 
Guiney,  Helen  Gray  Cone,  Florence  Earle  Coates, 
George  Sterling,  John  G.  Neihardt,  Harriet  Monroe, 
Arthur  Guiterman,  Angela  Morgan,  and  others  who, 
along  with  some  of  these,  think  they  possess  new  theo- 
ries about  poetry,  but  who  after  all  are- quite  conven- 
tional "practitioners"  of  poetry,  —  in  their  best  work. 
These  last  "others"  are  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Vachel  °thers 
Lindsay,  Amy  Lowell,  Robert  Frost,  Edward  Arling- 
ton Robinson,  and  John  Gould  Fletcher.  If  one  will 
turn  to  page  239  of  Miss  Amy  Lowell's  Tendencies  of 
Modern  American  Poetry,  he  will  find  there,  in  the 
chapter  on  "Imagists,"  the  creed  of  those  who  write 
the  "New  Poetry,"  as  they  term  it.  But  to  a  student 
of  literary  criticism  that  creed  is  strangely  old,  its 
chief  features  having  been  most  notably  set  forth  by 
Wordsworth  at  the  time  he  and  Coleridge  published 
their  Lyrical  Ballads.  Those  who  know  nothing 
about  poetry  and  those  who  know  much  about  it  do 
not  consider  the  "new  poets"  as  of  much  importance 
excepting,  as  we  have  said,  in  their  more  "conven- 
tional" work.  It  is  only  those  who  know  a  little,  but 
not  much,  about  poetry  who  exalt  their  humdrum  ef- 
forts. 

Field 

A  distinctively  western  poet  was  Eugene  Field;  so 
much  so  that  though  eastern  editors  tried  hard  to  en- 


—  72  — 

tice  him  even  to  New  York  city,  he  felt  that  Chicago 
was  as  far  east  as  he  could  go  for  fear  that  residence 
farther  east  would,  as  he  said,  squeeze  out  of  what  he 
wrote  much  of  the  genuine  literary  flavor.  There  was 
not,  however,  a  great  deal  of  literary  flavor  in  most  of 
his  work.  It  was  nearly  all  mere  day  to  day  filling  for 
newspaper  columns.  His  verse  is  chiefly  of  the  hu- 
morous column  type,  but  it  was  the  very  best  of  that 
type.  It  is  only  for  a  few  poems  that  we  can  agree 
with  the  biographical  note  in  Stedman's  American  An- 
thology that  "this  rare  and  original  minstrel  of  the 
West  was  the  Yorick  of  American  poetry,  childhood's 
born  laureate,  and  no  less  a  scholar  by  nature  than  a 
man  of  infinite  humor,  and  of  inimitable,  if  sometimes 
too  eccentric,  jest." 

Eugene  Field  was  a  native  of  St.  Louis,  Missouri, 
born  there  in  1850.  He  was  educated  in  New  Eng- 
land, Illinois,  and  Missouri  schools,  and  engaged  in 
newspaper  work  at  St.  Louis,  St.  Joseph,  and  Kansas 
City,  Missouri,  and  at  Denver,  and  finally,  until  his 
death  in  1895,  on  the  Chicago  Daily  News.  His  least 
sophisticated,  least  conventional,  and  therefore  most 
distinctive  verse  was  written  before  1890,  —  the  ever 
popular  Little  Boy  Blue,  for  example,  in  1887,  though 
this  is  more  self-conscious  and  sophisticated  than  the 
verses  written  for  the  Denver  Tribune  before  1882.  A 
Little  Book  of  Western  Verse,  so  delightfully  Fieldian, 
appeared  in  1889,  as  did  also  a  book  of  prose  entitled 
A  Little  Book  of  Profitable  Tales. 

The  immediate  demands  of  those  whose  reading  is 
almost  exclusively  of  the  daily  journals  was  what  Field 
wrote  to  satisfy.    This  is  not  to  say  that  therefore  his 


—  73  — 

poetry  is  poor,  for  the  newspaper  audience  is  a  very 
respectable  audience  not  only  in  size  but  in  general 
intelligence.  Still,  nearly  all  that  he  supplied  for  this 
demand  was  light  literature.  In  his  later  years  Field 
appealed  a  little  more  directly  to  more  "cultured" 
readers  by  the  poems  which  reflected  his  studies  in 
Old  English  ballads  and  in  Latin  literature.  But  it  is 
the  sentimental,  though  wholesomely  sentimental, 
poems  such  as  Little  Boy  Blue,  and  such  unfailingly 
charming  fairy-child  poems  as  Wynken,  Blynken,  and 
Nod  that  make  him  live  on  for  us.  The  Sugar-Plum 
Tree,  too,  and  Pittypat  and  Tippytoe,  Little  Blue  Pig- 
eon, The  Rock-a-By  Lady,  The  Ride  to  Bumpville,  and 
The  Shut-Bye  Train  will,  without  doubt,  delight  chil- 
dren, little  and  large,  always.  Many  of  Field's  chil- 
dren's poems  have  been  set  to  music,  and  their  per- 
petuation thus  further  insured.  / 

John  Banister  Tabb,  who  died  in  1900,  was  an  edu-  FatherTabb 
cator  in  Maryland,  and  wrote  brief  lyrics  which  have 
been  keenly  admired  by  lovers  of  thoughtful  directness 
and  exquisite  finish  in  verse.  A  volume  published  in 
1894  and  another  in  1897  contain  his  most  artistic  pro- 
duction. The  Water  Lily,  To  Shelley,  and  The  Druid 
are  often  quoted  from  these  volumes.  Moral  and  re- 
ligious devotion,  and  yet  freedom  of  the  spirit  to  ex- 
press itself  in  its  individual  rightness,  distinguish  the 
poems  of  this  careful  and  earnest  devotee  of  both  re- 
ligion and  art. 

James  Whitcomb  Riley  is,  as  we  have  said,  a  sur-  Riley 
vivor  of  earlier  days,  though  a  few  later  poems,  such  as 
the  sonnet  to  Longfellow  which  was  published  in  1892 
(  an  earlier  one  was  written  with  the  same  title),  sur- 


74  — 


From 
Pedagogue 
to  Poet 


Markham 


pass  most  of  his  verses  which  we  so  trippingly  recite 
from  our  childhood  memories. 

The  schoolmaster's  profession  has  supplied  to  litera- 
ture almost  as  many  recruits  within  the  past  few  dec- 
ades as  the  law  supplied  during  the  period  of  national 
expansion  before  1890.  Of  those  who  have  been  grad- 
uated from  chair  at  desk  to  book  upon  its  top,  Edwin 
Markham  is  one  with  the  greater  reputation.  A  de- 
scendant of  the  Penn  family,  and  directly  sprung  from 
pioneers  emigrating  from  Michigan  to  Oregon,  he  be- 
came a  hard-working  teacher,  principal,  and  superin- 
tendent in  the  schools  of  California.  The  financial  suc- 
cess of  The  Man  with  the  Hoe  made  it  possible  for  him 
to  take  up  the  profession  of  letters  and  give  to  it  exclu- 
sive attention.  This  poem,  suggested  by  a  painting  by 
J.  F.  Millet,  is  not  accorded  by  its  author  the  first  place 
among  his  many  poems.  That  distinction  belongs  to 
his  "Lincoln,"  published  in  Lincoln  and  Other  Poems 
in  1900.  Yet  George  Hamlin  Fitch"  in  Great  Spiritual 
Writers  of  America  makes  the  high  claim  for  The 
Man  with  the  Hoe  that  it  is  "the  finest  thing  that  has 
been  produced  in  American  literature  since  the  Civil 
War."  A  third  book,  The  Shoes  of  Happiness  and 
Other  Poems,  appeared  in  1915.  The  title  poem  is 
a  fascinating  tale  of  Constantinople  and  the  East,  but 
too  obviously  indebted  to  John  Hay's  The  Enchanted 
Shirt  to  be  in  any  sense  original  as  a  story.  Its  de- 
scriptive passages,  however,  are  vivid  and  colorful. 
"Virgilia,"  in  the  same  volume,  is  a  poem  of  much 
greater  merit.  Markham  has  been  acclaimed  "the 
greatest  poet  of  the  social  passion."  This  estimate,  as 
that  of  George  Fitch,  just  quoted,  is  an  exaggerated 


—  75  — 

one ;  but  that  a  tonic  pleasure,  even  a  life-transforming  , 

power,  has  been  derived  by  many  from  some  of  the 
poems  of  Mr.  Markham  is  beyond  question;  and, 
though  he  was  born  in  1852,  his  latest  volume  gives  no 
sign  that  his  natural  strength  has  abated. 

We  are  on  safe  literary  ground  when  we  open  the 
pages  upon  which  appear  the  poems  of  George  Edward 
Woodberry.  Professor  Woodberry  is  bold  enough  to  £n,oth1er 
attempt  to  express  much  which  he  himself  has  termed 
"inexpressible ;"  hence  his  verse,  while  intellectually  in- 
vigorating, is  not  often  of  absorbing  interest  to  the 
casual  reader.  Poems  of  love,  poems  of  nature,  poems 
for  music's  own  sake,  he  has  written;  but  it  is  the 
poems  purely  in  worship  of  the  spiritually  ideal  that 
have  claimed  his  rarer  hours  and  have  given  him  in- 
ternational fame  and  vogue.  Woodberry  has  been  Woodberry 
compared  with  Shelley  in  temperament  and  with  Ten- 
nyson in  technique.  He  does  show  the  passion  in 
quest  of  the  ideal  which  so  strongly  characterized 
Shelley  and  made  him  the  superior  poet  of  his  day,  but 
it  is  only  a  touch  of  Shelley's  genius  that  possesses 
the  American  poet ;  far  inferior  in  power  he  is.  Wood- 
berry's  indebtedness  to  Tennyson  may  be  an  uncon- 
scious one,  but  it  is  obtrusive  in  his  work.  Yet  if  he  is 
at  all  an  imitator  we  may  be  grateful  that  his  model 
is  an  exalted  one  in  art,  for  the  uncritical  and  the 
critic  who  really  knows  have  never  questioned  the  ar- 
tistically fine  character  of  the  skill  of  Tennyson.  It  is 
only  the  parvenu  with  little  sense  for  the  aesthetically 
winning  who  has  girded  at  that  art. 

Woodberry's  threnody,  The  North  Shore  Watch,  is 
usually  considered  the  most  sincere  and  sympathetic 


76 


of  all  this  poet's  verse.  It  is  spiritually  satisfying. 
Nevertheless,  to-day  when  the  English  speaking  na- 
tions are  fraternizing  as  never  before  in  their  history, 
his  two  sonnets  entitled  At  Gibraltar,  and  a  third 
America  to  England,  the  country  whom  he  hails  as 

Mother  of  nations,  of  them  eldest  we  — 
Mother  of  our  faith,  our  law,  our  lore, 

are  even  more  appealing,  especially  when  the  note 
struck  at  the  end  of  the  last-named  sonnet  is 


Still  another 
Teacher 


Hovey 


Justice  we  love,  and  next  to  justice  peace! 

Among  other  professors  of  literature  in  American 
colleges  who  have  become  makers  of  literature,  Rich- 
ard Hovey  is  not  one  of  the  least.  He  has  been  called 
"a  later  Lanier."  Undoubtedly  his  The  Laurel:  an 
Ode,  published  in  1889,  was  greatly  influenced  by  La- 
nier. And  later  volumes,  Songs  from  Vagabondia, 
written  by  Hovey  and  the  Canadian  poet  Bliss  Car- 
man, and  More  Songs  from  Vagabondia,  and,  again, 
Last  Songs  from  Vagabondia,  are  over-done  in  their 
zestful  imitation  of  the  vagrom  spirit  of  Walt  Whit- 
man. But  his  Seazvard,  an  elegy,  is  a  poem  of  great 
beauty  and  exquisite  point  and  finish ;  and  his  poetic 
dramas,  already  mentioned  under  the  general  title  of 
Launcelot  and  Guenevere  (1891-1898),  planned  as  a 
cycle  of  nine  dramas,  but  completed  only  through  the 
fourth,  are  among  the  best  of  American  poems.  The 
Arthurian  legends  are  here  re-written  with  a  bold  and 
daring  hand.  The  treatment  is  fresh  and  vital,  though 
not  so  elevated  in  its  imagination  as  that  of  the  Tenny- 
sonian  Idylls  of  the  King.    Hovey  chose  to  re-tell  the 


—  77  — 

more  virile  stories  of  Sir  Thomas  Malory,  not  those  of 
Tennyson.  Few  critics  hesitate  to  say  that  the  fourth 
and  last  of  these  Arthurian  dramas,  Taliesin:  A 
Masque,  is  not  only  the  best  of  the  group  but  is  also 
one  of  the  most  inviting  and  engaging  of  literary  dra- 
mas of  this  day.  It  is  a  story  of  the  quest  of  the  Grail 
by  Percival,  but,  as  George  Meredith  would  say,  "the 
narrative  is  nothing;"  the  profound  thought  of  the 
poem  and  the  excellent  verse  are  the  elements  of  it 
which  stir  and  thrill  him  who  is  willing  to  follow  in  the 
path  of  metaphysics  set  to  music.  There  is  much  of 
Swinburnian  melody  in  the  lines  of  this  great  poem, 
but  the  lift  of  them  as  they  come,  wave  after  wave, 
unto  the  end,  makes  one  forget  anything  derivative, 
and  breathlessly  to  rise  with  the  author  to  the 
heights  of 

Joy  like  the  joy  of  a  multitude  thrilled  into  one. 

In  1898  Hovey  published  a  volume,  Along  the  Trail, 
containing  battle-hymns  suggested  by  the  Spanish- 
American  war.  The  hymn  that  stands  by  itself  and 
foremost  is  "Unmanifest  Destiny,"  a  poem  hopeful, 
comforting,  and  inspiring.  In  its  last  stanza  the  poem 
inevitably  suggests  Whittier's  Eternal  Goodness.  This 
is  to  commend,  however,  and  not  to  condemn,  when 
one  reads  from  Hovey 

I  do  not  know  beneath  what  sky 
Nor  on  what  seas  shall  be  thy  fate ; 

I  only  know  it  shall  be  high, 
I  only  know  it  shall  be  great. 

The  early  death  of  Hovey  (in  February,  1900)  was 
a  nation's  tragic  loss,  for  he  gave  promise  almost  be- 


-78- 

yond  expectation.    As  the  success  of  Frank  Norris  in 
fiction  lay  partly  in  his  failure,  so  the  failures  of  Hovey 
in  poetry  only  emphasized  the  greatness  of  his  gifts. 
Th*  poet  of  The  relation  of  literature  to  life  is  closely  exempli- 

the  Southern  J  r 

Landscape  fied  in  the  poetry  of  Madison  Cawein.  Cawein  was 
born,  was  educated,  and  resided  at  Louisville,  Ken- 
tucky. He  took  to  himself  the  heart  of  nature  (or  did 
she  take  him  to  her  heart?)  in  that  region;  and  the 
glory  of  the  slumbrous  landscape  of  the  South,  the 
loveliness  of  its  detail  in  tree,  and  cloud,  and  flower, 
and  in  the  life  of  man  and  of  animal,  are  reflected  in 
his  books.  The  very  titles  of  individual  poems, 
"Wild  Iris,"  "Heat,"  "Before  the  Rain,"  "To  the  Lo- 
cust," "The  Twilight  Moth,"  "The  Rain-Crow,"  "The 
Whippoorwill,"  "The  Tree-Toad,"  "Feud,"  "Dead 
Man's  Run,"  "Ku  Klux,"  "The  Moonshiner,"  "The 
Quest,"  "Old  Homes,"  and  the  titles  of  his  books, 
Weeds  by  the  Wall,  Kentucky  Poems,  Myth  and  Ro- 
mance, Undertones,  The  Garden  of  Dreams,  Red 
Leaves  and  Roses,  more  than  suggest  the  sensitiveness 
of  Cawein  to  his  environment. 

Story,  and  picture,  and  fanciful  thought,  and  grace- 
ful lyric  rhythm  are  his  to  use  as  he  wills,  —  this  lyrist 
of  the  seasons;  and  one  who  reads  his  poems  knows 
that  in  his  soul  he  has  been  in  the  fair  southland,  for 
here 

Of  honey  and  heat  and  weed  and  wheat 
The  day  has  made  perfume, 


and  then 


It's  —  Oh,  for  the  gate  and  the  locust  lane 
And  dusk  and  dew  and  home  again ! 


—  79  — 
Frederick  Lawrence  Knowles  has  for  several  years  A  reviewer 

*  who  is 

been  literary  adviser  of  various  Boston  publishing  Poet»  t(x> 
houses.  Despite  his  occupation  as  reviewer  he  is  an 
optimistic  writer;  not  so  optimistic  of  the  present  as 
of  the  future,  yet  believing  firmly  that  the  forward 
flowing  tide  of  time  holds  in  trust  much  to  be  given 
into  our  hands  in  days  not  now  fir  distant.  Mr. 
Knowles,  obedient  to  an  aesthetic  conscience,  has 
edited  an  excellent  Golden  Treasury  of  American  Lyr- 
ics, and  has  published  two  volumes  of  original  poems, 
Love  Triumphant  and  On  Life's  Stairway.  No 
poems  in  these  volumes  are  better  than  the  sonnet  "If 
Love  Were  Jester  at  the  Court  of  Death;"  but  we  are 
especially  grateful  to  him  for  his  insistence  in  another 
poem  that  in  poetry  we  need 

that  cosmic  stuff 
Whence  primitive  feeling  glows, 

and  even  more  grateful  for  the  added  insistence  that 
this  cosmic  stuff  shall  have 

Grown,  organized  to  the  needs  of  rhyme 

Through  the  old  instinctive  lazvs, 
With  a  meaning  as  broad  as  the  boughs  of  time 

And  deep  as  the  roots  of  cause. 

Much  of  the  "new  Poetry"  highly  vaunted  by  those 
who  know  only  a  little  of  what  poetry  is  and  can  do  is 
void  of  meaning  as  it  is  void  of  organization,  and  void 
of  organization  so  often  because  there  is  nothing  to  or- 
ganize; all  such  poetry  would  seem,  in  the  light  of  this 
demand,   to  be   unacceptable   to   Mr.    Knowles,   even 


—  8o  — 

though  collections  of  "new  poetry"  have  included  some 
of  his  verse  within  their  pages. 

One  of  the  writers  who  of  late  have  come  rapidly 

Rice  forward  in  public  esteem  is  Cale  Young  Rice,  whose 

wife,  Alice  Hegan  Rice,  is  also  a  popular  writer, 
though  in  prose  fiction.  Mr.  Rice's  latest  volume, 
Earth  and  New  Earth,  came  from  the  press  after  the 
outbreak  of  the  War,  and  is  of  immediate  interest  be- 
cause it  voices,  among  other  notes,  the  author's  strong 
loathing  of  the  militarism  which  has  plunged  the 
world  into  this  frightful  holocaust  and  voices  also  his 
aspiration  toward  a  world  citizenship  after  the  war. 
The  title  poem,  "Earth  and  New  Earth,"  the  group  of 
poems  entitled  "Winds  of  War,"  and  a  one-act  play 
called  "Gerhard  of  Ryle,"  are  born  of  artistic  ideals 
and  are  of  more  than  temporary  value. 

The  foremost  man  of  letters  given  to  the  world  by 

Dunbar  the  negro  race  of  America  is  Paul  Laurence  Dunbar. 
The  short-stories  of  negro  life  included  in  Old  Plan- 
tation Days  are  admirable  for  their  fresh  excellence, 
and  his  better  poems,  as  those  in  Lyrics  of  Lowly 
Life,  are  attractive  wholly  apart  from  the  influence 
of  a  reader's  sympathy  with  his  race.  Whether  the  ad- 
mixture of  white  blood  accounts  for  the  success  of  the 
French  mulatto  Dumas  and  of  the  Russian  mulatto 
Pushkin,  one  cannot  tell ;  but  in  Dunbar,  a  man  of  pure 
African  blood,  there  was  the  power  to  produce  lyric 
literature  commanding  the  respect  of  all  his  contem- 
poraries in  England  and  America.  Not  every  one  who 
reads  Dunbar  agrees  with  W.  D.  Howells  that  the  most 
commendable  of  his  poems  are  those  which  study  the 


—  8i  — 

moods  and  traits  of  his  race  in  its  own  accent  of  our 
English.  Some  decidedly  prefer  the  lyrics  "Ere  sleep 
comes  down  to  soothe  the  weary  eyes,"  "A  Summer's 
Night,"  and  the  sonnet  "To  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe." 
Dunbar  died  in  1906.  His  successor,  as  most  prom- 
inent man  of  his  race  in  literature,  is  William  Stanley 
Braithwaite,  editor,  anthologist,  critic,  and  poet.  He 
has  published  two  volumes  of  verse,  Lyrics  of  Life  and 
Love  and  The  House  of  Falling  Leaves,  and  many 
poems  in  magazines.  By  virtue  of  his  Anthology  of 
Mazazine  Verse  for  each  year  since  191 3,  he  is  recog- 
nized as  chief  sponsor  for  current  American  poetry. 
There  is  authentic  poetry,  even  if  not  much  of  new 
quality,  in  the  verse  of  Frank  Dempster  Sherman,  a  Frank 
teacher  of  architecture  in  Columbia  University  and  a  Sherman 
literary  reviewer,  as  well  as  a  poet  of  distinction.  His 
metrical  efforts  hardly  rise  to  the  heights  of  the  per- 
fection assigned  them  by  recent  notices  of  his  col- 
lected poems,  but  many  are  endowed  with  the  gift  of 
nobility.  The  Little  Folk  Lyrics  of  1892  and  1897  have 
not  been  excelled  among  his  own  lines  in  appeal  to 
the  average  lover  of  modern  verse.  They  are  thought- 
ful as  well  as  entertaining. 

All  up  and  down  in  shadow-town 

The  Shadow  children  go ; 
In  every  street  you're  sure  to  meet 

Them  running  to  and  fro, 

has,  for  both  children  and  adults,  the  authentic  ring  of 
child  life  and  imagination. 

In  Lloyd  Mifflin's   eleven   little  volumes   of   verse,  Lloyd 

J  .  Mifflin 

over  five  hundred   sonnets   have  been  published,   to- 


Alan  Seeger 


—    82    — 

gether  with  other  poems.  Mifflin  was  first  a  painter, 
but  later  devoted  himself  chiefly  to  the  study  and  cre- 
ation of  the  sonnet.  His  passions  have  been  youth, 
love,  spirituality,  and  poetry.  His  last  volume,  As 
Twilight  Falls,  finds  its  author  an  aged  man,  yet  it  in- 
cludes many  of  his  best  sonnets  and  lyrics. 

Had  Alan  Seeger  supervised  the  bringing  out  of  the 
beautiful  volume  of  Poems  which  were  written  by  him, 
some  of  the  poems  included  would  have  been  elimin- 
ated. His  almost  enviable  death,  as  he,  a  member  of 
the  Foreign  Legion  of  France,  was  charging  enemy 
trenches  on  the  field  of  Belloy-en-Santerre,  July  4, 
1916,  made  impossible  his  editing  of  his  own  work. 
But  some  of  the  poems  in  this  volume  the  world  could 
not  afford  to  lose. 

One  crowded  hour  of  glorious  life 
Is  worth  an  age  without  a  name,  — 

one  cannot  refrain  from  quoting  when  he  thinks 
of  the  brief  but  brilliant  career  of  this  young  student, 
traveler,  poet,  and  soldier.  His  great  achievement, 
after  all,  was  his  singing  a  marching-song  to  his  com- 
rades as  he  lay  dying  and  they  were  charging  to  vic- 
tory, —  yet  not  that  alone,  for  two  poems,  the  Ode  in 
Memory  of  the  American  Volunteers  Fallen  for 
France  and  /  Have  a  Rendezvous  with  Death,  are  in- 
spired poetry.  We  could  dispense  with  the  Juvenilia, 
though  some  of  its  Mexican  verses  are  vivid  in  their 
imaginative  touches ;  we  could  dispense  with  the  thirty 
Sonnets  and  with  the  Translations ;  but  the  Ode  and 
the  Rendezvous  with  Death  will  be  vital  forever  with 


-83- 

their  echo  of  war  "in  its  actual  stress  and  under  its 
haunting  menace."  The  last  lines  of  the  Ode  and  all 
of  the  other  poem  were  as  nearly  prophecy  as  mortal 
lips  have  uttered. 

The  spirit  of  Elizabethan  poetry  has  not  entirely  EiSabetiaS' 
vanished  from  the  earth.  Proof  of  this  is  furnished 
by  the  verse  of  Mrs.  Olive  Tilford  Dargan  and  by  that 
of  Miss  Lizette  Woodworth  Reese.  To  be  sure,  as 
one  star  differs  from  another  in  glory,  so  these  poets 
differ  in  great  measure  of  glory  from  the  Elizabethans 
in  both  the  gift  of  noble  thought  and  of  lofty 
speech;  and  they  two  differ  from  each  other  in  lyric 
power.  The  talent  of  Mrs.  Dargan  tends  to  the  garVga™ord 
drama,  as  we  have  already  indicated,  though  in  her 
dramas  there  are  fine  bursts  of  personal  feeling  em- 
bodied in  choicely  melodious  lyric  strains.  She  has 
made  many  contributions  of  lyric  verse  to  magazines, 
and  a  recent  volume,  Path  Flower,  is  filled  with  flashes 
of  beauty.  A  reading  of  "To  a  Hermit  Thrush"  and 
"There's  Rosemary"  will  introduce  one  to  poetry  in 
which,  especially  in  the  second  of  these,  the  old  mas- 
tery of  vowel  music  lives  again. 

The  representative  work  of  Miss  Reese,  a  Maryland 
woman,  is  in  A  Handful  of  Lavender  and  A   Quiet  Woodworth 

'■•'•*  »  Reese 

Road.  As  a  lyric  poet  she  is  superior  to  Mrs.  Dargan, 
though  the  lyric  power,  while  more  full,  is  more  quiet. 
There  is  not  in  American  literature  much  poetry  like 
that  of  Miss  Reese.  It  belongs  to  the  elder  classic 
world  of  English  literature.  There  is  much  of  Ameri- 
can prose  that  belongs  in  style  and  spirit  to  earlier 
days,  yet  our  verse  rarely  assumes  the  body  or  the 


-84- 

robe  of  an  earlier  date.  But  Lizette  Woodworth  Reese 
might  well  have  lived  in  the  golden  days  of  Herrick 
and  Lovelace.  Not  that  she  is  an  imitator  of  an  earlier 
time;  her  poetry  has  the  flavor  rather  of  a  dateless  age, 
but  in  seventeenth  century  England  there  chanced  or 
were  ordained  to  be  more  poets  of  her  type  than  be- 
fore or  since.  Greece  has  had  them,  too,  and  Italy, 
yes,  and  France.  "Late  Elizabethans"  and  "Caroline 
poets"  have  always  been,  and  have  always  subtly 
thought  and  curiously  wrought.  Miss  Reese  loves 
beauty  for  its  own  sake,  but  the  expression  of  beauty 
is  with  her  the  expression  of  truth,  —  the  beautiful  is 
the  good  made  perfect,  too.  Into  her  verse  comes  the 
truth  of  her  experience,  and  it  is  good  and  useful  be- 
cause it  is  beautiful.  "To  a  White  Lilac,"  "Love  Came 
Back  at  Fall  O'  Dew,"  "Keats,"  "Thomas  a  Kempis," 
and  "To  a  Town  Poet,"  such  poems  as  these  are  net 
many  amid  the  flood  of  verse  that  fills  our  anthologies. 
One  wonders,  after  all,  if  the  aptest  characterization 
of  Miss  Reese  would  not  be  that  she  is  a  wanderer 
from  a  Grecian  shore. 
Edith  Thomas  Miss  Edith  Thomas,  born  in  Ohio  in  1854,  is  one  of 
the  foremost  singers  of  the  World  War.  Her  themes 
are  salient  ones,  and  the  verses  expressing  those  themes 
are  not  written  for  verse's  sake  only,  but  for  the  sake 
also  of  inspiration,  and  of  comfort.  She  had,  how- 
ever, for  many  years  before  the  war  pleased  the  public 
with  her  emotional  verse,  and  pleased  the  intellectuals 
with  other  verse  not  lacking  in  emotion  but  primarily 
philosophical  in  its  content.  She  writes  nothing  that 
is  not  next  to  super-perfect  in  finish.     It  is  all  poetry. 


-8s- 

true  poetry,  in  feeling,  in  form,  and  in  power  to 
lift  the  mind  from  the  particular  to  the  universal,  or, 
when  she  chooses,  to  drive  the  mind  from  its  refuge 
in  generalizations  back  to  the  particular,  the  concrete, 
the  daily  real.  Her  style  is  varied,  yet  never  straying 
from  the  grace  and  taste  of  the  poets  of  the  more 
classic  days,  not  even  in  her  most  passionate  mo- 
ments. Her  more  intellectual  poems  will  probably 
survive  those  which  are  primarily  of  feeling,  unusual 
as  this  may  seem.  There  may  be  "thoughts  beyond  the 
thrall  of  words,"  but  Miss  Thomas  dares  to  put  into 
her  energetic  verse  thoughts  to  give  form  to  which 
has  puzzled  the  philosophers  from  the  Greeks  down. 
Single  poems,  "The  Compass,"  "They  Said,"  "Palin- 
genesis," "The  Soul  of  the  Violet,"  "The  Inverted 
Torch,"  "A  Far  Cry  to  Heaven,"  and  others  are  among 
the  treasured  gems  of  our  literature.  An  excursion 
through  her  many  little  volumes  which  have  come 
from  the  press  from  time  to  time  all  the  way  from 
1885  until  very  recently,  will  reward  with  new  and 
added  beauty  the  truer  poetic  memories  of  one  who 
will  adventure  among  these  little  masterpieces  of  art 
and  thought. 

Gertrude  Hall  was  born  in  Boston,  educated  in  Gertrude  Hail 
Florence,  Italy,  and  now  resides  in  New  York  City. 
She  is  an  excellent  translator,  accomplishing  consum- 
mate work  in  her  rendering  into  English  from  the 
French  of  Paul  Verlaine  and  of  Edmond  Rostand.  In 
her  original  verse  she  is  our  present-day  poet  of  the 
quaint,  the  fanciful,  the  wistful.  Far  from  To-day, 
Allegretto,  and   The  Age  of  Fairy  gold  are  titles  of 


—  86  — 

three  of  her  books,  and  in  themselves  the  titles  illus- 
trate the  contents  of  the  books.  Many  of  her  poems, 
are  of  nature  and  many  of  human  love,  and  are  as  ir- 
resistible as  the  things  they  celebrate. 

Hempstead  Some  of  the  most  reflective,  if  not  profound,  and 

most  artistic  poems  of  recent  days  are  included  in  the 
three  volumes  by  Anna  Hempstead  Branch,  The  Shoes 
That  Danced  and  Other  Poems,  The  Heart  of  the 
Road  and  Other  Poems,  and  Rose  of  the  Wind.  They 
are  written  only  for  lovers  of  poetry ;  they  will  not 
compel  the  attention  of  the  unwilling.  The  long  poem 
'Nimrod"  in  Rose  of  the  Wind  is,  as  its  title  suggests, 
a  treatment  of  a  very  ancient  tradition.  It  is  a  subtly 
ingenious  piece  of  work. 

Marks^again  ^n  tne  Poetry  of  Josephine  Preston  Peabody  there  is 
much  of  mystery,  much  of  subtle  guessing  about  the 
riddle  of  our  life,  much  pursuing  of  elusive  thought. 
Yet  all  is  handled,  not  in  fanci fulness,  but  with 
strongly  imaginative  power.  -  Her  best  dramas,  Mar- 
lowe and  The  Piper,  we  have  already  briefly  dis- 
cussed. The  lyric  verse,  together  with  some  dramatic 
dialogue,  is  contained  in  the  volumes  entitled  fortune 
and  Men's  Byes,  The  Wayfarers,  Singing  Leaves,  and 
The  Harvest  Moon,  the  last  being  dedicated  "To  the 
Women  of  Europe."  We  have  learned  to  expect  only 
the  true,  the  beautiful,  and  the  pure  in  her  delicate 
yet  energetic  verse. 

Alice  Brown  Alice  Brown's  unwearied  labors  as  dramatist,  nov- 
elist, and  short-story  writer  have  left  little  time  for 
poetry,  though  one  volume,  The  Road  to  Castaly,  has 
attracted     world-wide     attention.       William     Vaughn 


-87- 

Moody's  untimely  death  deprived  us  of  one  who  prom-  Mo°dy 
ised  greatness  in  poetry  as  in  drama.  The  Departure, 
Heart  O'  Wild  Flower,  and  many  others  reveal  the 
nature-seer,  the  psychologist,  and  the  musician  that 
Moody  was.  His  poems  call  one  back  to  them,  for  the 
melodies  are  haunting,  the  thought  fascinating;  one 
feels  that  here  more  is  said  than  meets  the  eye,  more 
that  one  wants  to  hear,  and  to  hear  again  and  again. 
We  have  lately  come  to  the  appreciation  of. Japanese 
art,  helped  to  it  partly  by  the  verse  of  Mrs.  Mary  Mary  McNeil 
McNeil  Fenollosa,  who  resided  in  Japan  for  eight  eno  osa 
years,  and  whose  lovely  lilting  lyrics  are  a  constant 
source  of  delight  to  all  who  know  them,  as  are  the 
descriptive  poems,  with  their  picturesqueness  seem- 
ingly both  fanciful  and  real.  Some  of  the  phi- 
losophy of  the  Orient  has  crept  into  her  verse,  but  the 
verse  is  chiefly  lyrical.  "To  a  Japanese  Nightingale" 
and  "An  Eastern  Cry"  will  give  a  hint  of  the  quality  of 
the  fashioning  of  her  pictures  as  they  are  drawn  in  her 
Oriental  poems,  a  quality  vital,  impulsive,  fully  musi- 
cal and  faintly  melancholy. 

Our  better  magazines  and  weekly  periodicals  are 
frequently  kept  in  the  path  of  a  fine  tradition  by  the 
fugitive  poetry  which  poets  whom  we  have  discussed 
and  others,  minor  ones,  and  even  masters  of  prose, 
occasionally  contribute.  An  anthology  of  verse  from 
magazines  of  the  past  thirty  years,  though  it  were  of 
verse  as  yet  unpublished  in  any  book  form,  would  fill 
a  large  volume,  however  exacting  of  quality  the  anthol- 
ogist might  be. 


Ill 

THE  LITERATURE   OF 
CANADA 


Ill 

THE  LITERATURE  OF 

CANADA 


The  Writers  of  Fiction.  —  The  first  native-born 
Canadian  to  make  real  and  permanent  a  native  litera- 
ture in  Canada  was  Charles  G.  D.  Roberts,  who  is 
now  a  captain  training  cadets  in  England  and  Wales. 
Although  philosophers,  scientists,  and  historians,  such 
as  Grant  Allen,  George  John  Romanes,  and  Goldwin 
Smith  had  been  giving  Canada  a  world  reputation  in 
research  and  in  thought,  yet  literature  inseparable 
from  the  soil  did  not  appear  in  our  neighbor  country 
until  about  1887,  when  Roberts's  volume  of  verse  en- 
titled In  Divers  Tones  was  first  published.  This  and 
other  poetic  works  of  his  are  more  important  than  his 
imaginative  prose,  but  will  be  reserved  for  discussion 
in  the  treatment  of  the  Canadian  poets.  Roberts  has 
written  several  novels  and  other  prose  works,  the  chief   The  eider 

r  Roberts 

of  all  of  them  being  a  book  of  short  stories  and 
sketches  dealing  with  the  life  of  the  wild  and  with 
human  life  and  entitled  Earth's  Enigmas.  The  title 
means  precisely  what  it  says.  Another  distinctive  and 
absorbingly  interesting  work  is  The  Watchers  of  the 
Trails.  Roberts  was  born  in  New  Brunswick,  but  it 
was  while  he  was  professor  of  English  and  French  lit- 


—  92  — 

erature  in  King's  College  at  Windsor,  Nova  Scotia, 
that  he  gained  his  impressions  of  the  beauty  of  the 
earth  and  his  intimate  knowledge  of  creatures  of  field, 
forest,  and  stream  and  the  greater  waters,  and  that  the 
impulse  to  romantic  story-telling  and  to  lyricism  came 
to  him.  It  is  in  that  same  earthly  paradise  that  most 
of  the  best  literature  of  Canada  found  its  inception. 

Parker  Sir  Gilbert  Parker  is  a  citizen  of  the  British  Empire 

rather  than  of  Canada  alone,  not  merely  because  he 
has  lived  in  Australia  and  now  lives  in  London,  but 
because  the  characters  and  the  thought  in  his  novels, 
even  those  within  Canadian  setting,  are  characters  who 
might  live  and  thoughts  which  might  be  inspired  else- 
where within  imperial  limits.  Pierre  and  His  People, 
The  Seats  of  the  Mighty,  and  The  Right  of  Way  are 
his  most  read  novels.  He  is  the  author  also  of  many 
short-stories,  those  of  northern  life,  as  in  Northern 
Lights,  not  disappointing  the  expectation  of  any  who 
"     have  been  entertained  by  his  other  work. 

"Ralph  Ralph  Connor,  whose  real  name  is  Charles  William 

Connor"  x 

Gordon,  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  written  from  purely 
artistic  inspiration  or  purpose.  He  has  not  depicted 
life  because  he  was  compelled  to  do  so  by  the  intensity 
of  a  desire  to  see  life  as  it  may  be  re-presented  in  the 
magic  mirror  of  art,  but  because  he  wanted  to  preach. 
His  sole  aim  seems  to  have  been  an  ethical  one ;  in 
fact,  the  ethical  purpose  is  obtrusively  apparent.  The 
effect  of  art  may  be  a  moralistic  effect,  but  if  that  is 
its  aim,  the  aim  should  be  concealed.  Gordon's  work 
fails  to  be  artistic  in  another  respect,  also.  While  the 
true  artist  forms  his  characters  from  broadly  general 


—  93  — 

elements  in  human  life,  in  doing  so  he  makes  us  think 
he  is  really  depicting  particular  characters,  whose 
traits  are  peculiarly  individual;  the  true  artist  is  an 
historian  of  human  nature,  though  he  seems  to  be  a 
writer  of  actual  biographies.  But  Gordon  quite  obvi- 
ously has  failed  to  individualize  his  characters.  Yet 
The  Sky  Pilot  and  a  better  book  The  Man  from  Glen- 
garry have  excited  immense  interest  and  have  received 
high  praise.  They  are  interesting  and  praiseworthy,  but, 
as  we  have  said,  for  their  moral  teaching  rather  than 
for  their  artistic  value.  Yet  this  is  not  quite  all,  for 
these  books  have  brought  to  the  uninformed  much  ac- 
curate knowledge  of  the  types  of  life  lived  in  the  moun- 
tains and  forests  of  Canada. 

Better  creative  writers,  even  if  less  popular,  than 
Gordon,  are  Margaret  Marshall  Saunders,  Sara 
Jeannette  Duncan,  and  Lucy  M.  Montgomery  (now 
Mrs.  Ewan  McDonald).  Lucy  M.  Montgomery  has 
captivated  the  youth  of  all  America  with  her  Anne  of  QreenGabie 
Green  Gables. 

Our  neighbor  to  the  north  has  one  author  who  has 
been   dubbed,   in  an   exaggerated   fashion,   the   Mark  "The 

m         •  r  ^  «         ,  Mark  Twain 

Twain  of  Canada,  —  Stephen  Leacock,  of  Montreal.  In  of  Canada" 
reality,  he  is  more  American  than  Canadian,  and  for 
two  reasons :  his  work  is  written  mainly  for  readers  on 
this  side  the  border,  as  most  of  its  facts  and  its  allu- 
sions show,  and  the  sort  of  humor  he  is  given  to  is  the 
American  brand,  with  its  burlesque,  its  exaggeration, 
and  its  consciously  deliberate  mingling  of  the  serious 
with  the  comic.  Leacock  was  born  in  England,  and 
perhaps  this  may  account  for  his  apparent  failure  to 


—  94  — 

become  acclimatized  to  the  intellectual  atmosphere  of 
Canada  and  for  his  keeping  an  eye  constantly  looking 
southward  and  even  across  seas.  Two  or  three  of  his 
volumes  are  worthless,  such  as  Behind  the  Beyond  and 
Frenzied  Fiction  and  Further  Foolishness,  but  Non- 
sense Novels,  Sunshine  Sketches,  Literary  Lapses, 
Arcadian  Adventures  with  the  Idle  Rich,  and  Literary 
Essays  and  Studies  command  respect  for  their  au- 
thor's wisdom  and  versatility  as  well  as  convulse  his 
readers  with  their  humor  and  wit. 

ofPoetUy  ^^e  P°ets- — We  have  mentioned  the  poetry  of 
Charles  G.  D.  Roberts.  His  son,  Lloyd  Roberts,  is 
not  much  less  than  second  to  the  father  in  nature  paint- 
ing and  in  melodious  phrasing,  as  even  he  who  runs  may 
readily  discover  in  the  1914  volume  entitled  England 
Overseas.  In  lyrical  movement  and  in  love  of  the 
lighter  phases  of  the  life  of  nature,  Lloyd  Roberts  is 
more  akin  to  Bliss  Carman,  his  father's  cousin.  The 
influence  of  the  elder  Roberts  upon  both  these  poets 
and  upon  every  other  one  who  has  written  in  Canada 
since  1887  demands  more  than  the  passing  mention  of 
his  work. 

Roberts  Charles  G.  D.  Roberts  was  not  only  the  first  but  the 
most  original  and  versatile,  and  has  still  done  the  best 
technical  artistic  work,  of  all  Canadian  authors.  We 
have  a  special  claim  upon  him,  too,  as  his  residence  now 
is  New  York  City.  After  some  experiments,  resulting  in 
a  volume  published  in  1880,  and  entitled  Orion  and 
Other  Poems,  Roberts  removed  from  Toronto  to  Nova 
Scotia  and  fell  under  the  spell  of  the  beauty  of  the  Old 
Acadian  land.     In   1887  In  Divers  Tones  was  pub- 


—  95  — 

fished,  and  all  discerning  readers  saw  that  a  new  star 
had  arisen  in  the  east.  Songs  of  the  Common  Day  and 
The  Book  of  the  Native  came  in  1893  and  in  1896  re- 
spectively, and  gained  their  author  recognition  in  Eu- 
rope as  well  as  upon  this  continent.  It  was  noted 
abroad  that  a  new  force  had  entered  literature,  a  force 
native  to  North  America,  but  questioning  the  enigmas 
and  mysteries  of  nature  and  of  the  human  soul  every- 
where. Other  volumes  followed,  among  them  New 
York  Nocturnes  and  The  Book  of  the  Rose.  Not  all 
of  the  verse  in  the  first  of  these  two  books  is  good; 
much  of  it  is  obvious  and  mechanical.  Possibly  the 
author  does  not  feel  at  home  away  from  Canada,  and, 
living  artificially,  perforce  must  write  artificially.  His 
best  single  poem  is  Ave :  An  Ode  for  the  Shelley  Cen- 
tenary, 1892.  The  wild  life  of  field  and  woodland  and 
air,  the  colorful  and  changeful  life,  animate  and  still, 
of  marsh  and  stream  and  lake,  the  insoluble  mysteries 
of  spirit,  human  and  divine,  fill  these  books  of  verse. 
Yet  it  is  doubtful  if  his  poetry  will  be  as  influential  in 
the  future  as  his  psychological  animal  stories  written 
in  imaginative  prose.  Roberts  is  more  Canadian,  less 
American,  in  prose  than  in  verse;  and  since  he  is  in 
prose  more  true  to  the  actual  in  the  local,  he  will  prob- 
ably live  longer  for  his  prose  than  for  his  verse. 

Bliss  Carman  lived  during  his  most  receptive  and  Bliss  Carman 
formative  years  in  the  home  of  his  uncle,  C.  G.  D. 
Roberts.  Under  this  influence,  Nova  Scotia  became 
his  early  inspiration,  and  the  poet  spirit  and  skill  of 
the  older  man  so  built  up  and  impelled  the  younger  that 
the  pupil  is  now  thought  by  many  to  be  superior  to  his 


-96- 

master,  —  as  the  pupil  should  be,  else  progress  would 
cease  in  the  world.  Bliss  Carman  is  better  known  in  this 
country  than  Roberts  is,  due  to  his  association  with 
Richard  Hovey  in  the  writing  of  the  three  little  vol- 
umes of  Songs  from  Vagabondia.  He  also  resides  in 
New  York.  But  it  is  the  strictly  Canadian  poem,  Low 
Tide  on  Grand  Pre,  that  takes  rank  as  his  leading 
poem.  It  is  always  the  mysterious  lure  of  the  sea  that 
elicits  the  most  devoted  service  of  Bliss  Carman's 
muse.    He  is  never  far  from  the 

Dream-like,    plangent,    and    eternal 
Memories  of  the  plunging  sea. 

His  poems  are  not  altogether  free  from  monotony 
and  many  are  over-elaborate  in  word  and  phrase ;  yet 
in  most  of  them  sound  and  form  are  consonant  with 
sense.  Bliss  Carman  has  become  less  wandering  in 
heart  as  he  has  grown  in  years,  and  more  and  more  he 
has  turned  away  from  personal  impressions  of  detail 
in  the  world  to  the  development  of  the  thought  of  the 
organic  unity  of  man  and  nature.  Lightness  of  spirit, 
though,  is  not  absent  from  the  later  poems,  in  the 
three  small  volumes  of  Pipes  of  Pan  and  in  The  Word 
at  Saint  Kavin's. 

Two  brothers  of  Charles  G.  D.  Roberts  as  well  as 
his  son  and  his  cousin  are  poets.  Theodore  Roberts  and 
William  Carman  Roberts,  both  now  residing  at  Fred- 
ericton,  New  Brunswick,  engaged  at  an  earlier  date  in 
journalism  in  New  York  City,  and  have  written  com- 
mendable verse  for  magazines  and  literary  periodicals. 
But  of  this  family  it  would  seem  to  be  only  Charles 


—  97  — 

Roberts,  Lloyd  Roberts,  and  Bliss  Carman  who  will 
not  be  overlooked  by  the  historian  of  literature  in  Eng- 
lish. 

Canadian  verse  writers  are  numerous.     The  salient  Many 

singers 

names  besides  those  considered  above  are  Gilbert  Par- 
ker, Lucy  M.  Montgomery,  Eric  Mackay  Yeoman, 
Robert  Norwood,  Hugh  John  Maclean,  W.  E.  Mar- 
shall, Archibald  Lampman,  Duncan  Campbell  Scott, 
Isabella  Valancy  Crawford  (who  died  in  1887),  Kath- 
erine  Hale  (Mrs.  J.  W.  Garvin),  Dr.  J.  B.  Dollard, 
Arthur  S.  Bourinot,  and  Douglas  Durkin,  and  per- 
haps Robert  Service  and  Dr.  W.  H.  Drummond 
of  the  "Vaudeville  School  of  Canadian  Poetry." 
Drummond's  The  Voyageur  and  The  Habitant  are 
very  popular,  but  hardly  "English  verse."  Service  ap- 
parently is  not  acceptable  to  all  at  home,  for  Sergeant 
J.  D.  Logan,  a  Canadian,  writing  from  a  camp  in  Eng- 
land after  the  publication  of  Service's  Rhymes  of  a 
Red  Cross  Man,  describes  the  content  of  the  book  as 
"versified  brutalities."  But,  however  much  one  may 
agree  that  nearly  all  of  the  verses  in  the  earlier  vol- 
umes by  Service  are  of  the  ten-twenty- thirty  variety, 
it  is  difficult  to  agree  with  the  Canadian  critic  that  all 
in  this  latest  volume  is  "illegitimate  verse." 

The  Rosalie,  a  sonnet  sequence  by  Eric  Mackay  Yeo- 
man, Love's  Diary,  another  sonnet  sequence,  by  Gil- 
bert Parker,  and  You  and  Memory  Pictures  by  Lucy 
M.  Montgomery  are  among  the  noble  and  beautiful 
lyrics  of  the  last  thirty  years.  Archibald  Lampman  is 
celebrated  above  most  of  his  fellow  versifiers  of  Can- 
ada, with  the  exception  of  Roberts  and  Carman,  for  his 
nature  poems.    He  has  a  philosophic  insight  and  vision 


-98- 

that  is  strong  and,  to  many  readers,  comforting.  His 
sonnet  Outlook  completely  recognizes  the  burden  of 
our  life,  yet  has  the  quietly  optimistic  uplift  which 
characterizes  all  the  saner  hours  of  the  greater  poets. 

Hugh  J.  Maclean's  A  Masque  is  a  praiseworthy  bit 
of  original  invention  destined  to  make  many  a  reader 
alert  to  the  rising  importance  of  the  poets  across  the 
border.  It  is  one  of  many  attempts  to  place  the  artist 
in  his  rightful  position  relative  to  the  soldier  and  the 
priest,  and,  brief  as  it  is,  may  not  be  passed  by  in 
the  literature  of  the  life  of  art.  It  may  not  have  the 
scope  of  the  dramatic  poems  in  the  same  field  by 
Hauptman,  Hirschfeld,  Hofmansthal,  and  Yeats,  but, 
as  the  diminutive  proportions  of  a  Corot  are  some- 
times superior  in  quality  to  the  mammoth  canvas  of  a 
Raphael  cartoon,  so  this  very  diminutive  dramatic 
poem  is  at  least  not  inferior  because  of  its  brevity.  The 
reader  will  find  it  upon  pages  223  and  224  of  the  Ca- 
nadian Magazine  for  January,  191 7. 

When  W.  E.  Marshall's  Brookfield,  an  elegiac  poem, 
appeared  in  1914,  the  Boston  Transcript  compared  its 
workmanship  and  compelling  expression  with  that  of 
the  famous  elegies  of  Milton,  Arnold,  Emerson,  and 
Whitman,  —  and  the  Transcript  is  a  very  conservative 
paper.  Isabella  Valancy  Crawford's  Love's  Land,  or, 
as  it  is  often  called,  The  Master  Builder,  is  typical  of 
the  poetry  of  Canadian  women,  in  its  joyousness,  its 
unselfish  eagerness  for  revealing  the  spirit  of  service, 
and  its  spirituality. 

Among  the  great  number  of  poems  inspired  by  the 
War,  in  which  Canada  has  revealed  herself  as  in  spirit 


—  99  — 

as  much  a  part  of  the  British  Empire  as  England  her- 
self, the  most  read  have  been  Dollard's  sonnet  upon 
the  death  of  Rupert  Brooke,  Durkin's  The  Fighting 
Men  of  Canada,  Duncan  Campbell  Scott's  To  a  Cana- 
dian Lad  Killed  in  the  War,  and  Katherine  Hale's  long 
poem  The  White  Comrade  and  her  briefer  poems  in 
Grey  Knitting  and  Other  Poems,  though  some  of  these 
are  not  so  sure  of  immortality  as  others  that  are  more 
immediately  appealing  to  the  popular  heart. 

The  series  of  sonnets  in  Robert  W.  Norwood's  His 
Lady  of  the  Sonnets  (1915),  for  tone  color,  for  mel- 
ody, and  for  loftiness  of  conception  of  the  "refining 
redemptive,  transmuting  power"  of  love  that  is  spir- 
itual, is  unsurpassed  in  the  work  of  this  group  of 
poets.  The  American  reader  who  may  yet  need  in- 
troduction to  the  fact  that  Canada  has  a  literature  may 
well  begin  with  the  sonnets  of  Norwood.  There  may 
be  less  of  artistry  in  them,  but  there  is  no  less  of  in- 
tellectual sincerity,  of  authentic  emotion,  of  genuine 
breadth  of  conception  than  in  the  poetry  of  the  pre- 
Raphaelites  of  nineteenth  century  England. 

Altogether,  it  would  not  have  been  difficult  in  19 13  g£jyChie! 
to  have  disagreed  with  the  opinion  of  Mr.  T.  G.  Mar- 
quis in  his  English-Canadian  Literature  that  "the  chief 
glory  of  Canadian  literature  is  in  its  poetry ;"  but  since 
the  beginning  of  the  Great  War,  while  the  value  of 
Canada's  imaginative  prose  has  not  decreased,  that  of 
its  poetry  has  so  appreciably  advanced  that  serious 
disagreement  as  to  the  relative  rank  of  the  prose  and 
the  poetry  of  this  Celtic  or  Gaelic  country  would  seem 
no  longer  possible. 


IV 

TABLE  OF  AMERICAN 
AUTHORS 


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PROBLEMS 


PROBLEMS 


Essays 

1.  Select  a  dozen  of  the  best  editorials  from  six  of 
the  best  metropolitan  newspapers  of  the  country,  pub- 
lished during  any  recent  week.  Project  your  mind 
twenty-five  years  into  the  future,  and  from  that  point 
of  view  in  time  estimate  the  lasting  values  of  those 
editorials. 

2.  Make  an  anthology  of  essays  from  magazines  of 
the  year  19 18. 

3.  Find  all  the  books  of  essays  published  in  Eng- 
lish during  the  years  1917-1918,  and  write  a  critical 
comparative  estimate  of  them. 

4.  Compare  the  American  essay  of  the  first  two 
decades  of  the  twentieth  century  with  that  of  a  cen- 
tury earlier. 

5.  Locate  the  following  sentences  from  President 
Wilson's  State  Papers  and  Addresses,  and  point  out 
their  bearing: 

a.  The  world  must  be  made  safe  for  democracy. 

b.  It  is  clear  that  nations  must  in  the  future  be 
governed  by  the  same  high  code  of  honor  that  we  de- 
mand of  individuals. 

c.  I  believe  in  the  ordinary  man. 

d.  It  is  not  an  army  that  we  must  shape  and  train 
for  war ;  it  is  a  nation. 

e.  The  day  has  come  to  conquer  or  submit. 


112   

f.  There  is,  therefore,  but  one  response  possible 
from  us :  Force,  Force  to  the  utmost,  Force  without 
stint  or  limit,  the  righteous  and  triumphant  Force 
which  shall  make  Right  the  law  of  the  world,  and  cast 
every  selfish  dominion  down  in  the  dust. 

g.  There  is  something  very  fine  in  the  spirit  of  the 
volunteer,  but  deeper  than  the  volunteer  spirit  is  the 
spirit  of  obligation. 

h.  Once  more  we  shall  make  good  with  our  lives 
and  fortunes  the  great  faith  to  which  we  were  born. 

i.  The  eyes  of  all  the  world  will  be  upon  you  be- 
cause you  are  in  some  special  sense  the  soldiers  of  free- 
dom. 

j.  The  great  duties  of  a  new  day  awaken  a  new 
and  greater  national  spirit  in  us. 

k.  Our  present  and  immediate  task  is  to  win  the 
war,  and  nothing  shall  turn  us  aside  from  it  until  it  is 
accomplished. . 

1.  What  we  seek  is  the  reign  of  law,  based  upon 
the  consent  of  the  governed,  and  sustained  by  the  or- 
ganization of  mankind. 

Fiction 

i.  Does  the  short-story  writer  of  the  present  time 
employ  artistic  unity  for  the  sake  of  the  effect  of  his 
story,  or  employ  his  story  for  the  sake  of  artistic 
unity  ?    Be  concrete. 

2.  Study  the  author  in  Bl'ix,  and  in  The  Three 
Fates,  and  in  Main-Travelled  Roads. 


—  H3  — 

3-  What  sets  apart  British  from  American  novel- 
ists of  the  present,  —  verbal  power,  constructive  abil- 
ity, or  selection  of  material? 

4.  Compare  the  leading  woman  characters  of  How- 
ells,  Grant,  Phillips,  and  Frank  Norris. 

5.  Study  the  earlier  works  of  Frank  Norris,  — 
Moran  of  the  Lady  Letty,  McTeague,  Blix,  and  A 
Man's  Woman,  —  for  the  descriptive  material  and 
qualities. 

6.  Search  for  the  primeval,  the  elemental,  in  Amer- 
ican fiction  of  to-day. 

7.  Trace  the  symbolic  character  of  the  leading 
personages  in  Ellen  Glasgow's  The  Miller  of  Old 
Church. 

8.  Owen  Wister  says,  "It  is  significant  to  note 
how  this  master  (Henry  James)  seems  to  be  teach- 
ing a  numerous  young  generation.  Often  do  I  pick 
up  some  popular  magazine  and  read  a  story  (one  even 
of  murder,  it  may  be,  in  tropic  seas  or  city  slums), 
where  some  canny  bit  of  foreshortening,  of  presenta- 
tion, reveals  the  spreading  influence,  and  I  say,  'Ah, 
my  friend,  never  would  you  have  found  out  how  to  do 
that  if  Henry  James  hadn't  set  you  thinking!'"  Find 
examples  of  the  influence  of  Henry  James  in  stories 
published  in  current  numbers  of  magazines. 

9.  Make  an  anthology  of  "Best  Short-Stories  of 
the  War,"  omitting  text,  but  supplying  title-page,  pref- 
ace (add  an  "Introduction,"  if  needed),  and  what- 
ever notes  and  bibliography  are  necessary  to  make 
the  volume  one  for  "study,"  and  not  for  reading  only. 


—  ii4  — 

io.  Study  the  North  American  Indian  in  recent 
fiction. 

ii.  John  Galsworthy's  definition  of  a  plot  is,  "That 
sure  edifice  which  slowly  rises  out  of  the  inter-play  of 
circumstances  on  temperament,  and  temperament  on 
circumstance,  within  the  enclosing1  atmosphere  of  an 
idea."  With  this  definition  as  a  starting-point,  write 
an  essay  upon  the  plot  of  novel  and  of  drama. 

12.  Discuss  the  function  of  conversation  in  drama. 

13.  Compare  magazine  illustration  of  short  stories 
of  the  present-day  with  those  of  forty  years  ago. 

Poetry 

1.  Study  the  humor  of  the  poetry  of  Robert  Burns 
and  of  Thomas  Hood.  Do  you  find  anything  like  their 
work  in  American  verse? 

2.  Read  the  Odes  mentioned  in  the  preceding 
pages,  and  compare  with  Coleridge's  France. 

3.  Read  the  article  upon  "The  Significance  of  Nova 
Scotia"  by  J.  D.  Logan  in  The  Canadian  Magazine  for 
November,  1916,  and  pursue  in  further  detail  the 
study  of  the  writers  of  Novia  Scotia. 

4.  Is  the  literature  of  Canada  more  or  less  similar 
to  that  of  Scotland  than  to  that  of  England? 

5.  Study  carefully  The  Lotos-Eaters  by  Tennyson. 
Compare  with  it,  simply  as  poetry,  your  favorite 
American  poem. 

6.  Make  two  lists  by  titles  of  the  verses  of  the  "new 
poets,"  futurists,  imagists,  and  the  like,  of  America, 
one  list  containing  the  poems  unmistakably  innovations 


—  n5  — 

in  form  and  the  other  of  those  following  already  em- 
ployed patterns. 

7.  Make  a  list  of  the  fifty  best  poems  in  American 
literature.  How  many  of  these  were  written  since 
1890? 

8.  Upon  which  is  the  finest  artistic  work  being  ex- 
erted in  America  to-day,  novel,  short-story,  essay,  or 
poem? 

9.  Is  the  following  true  ?  — 

Things  of  deep  sense  we  may  in  prose  unfold, 
But  they  move  more  in  lofty  numbers  told. 

10.  Find  the  three  best  Canadian  and  the  three 
best  American  poems  of  the  War. 

11.  Make  a  study  of  story-telling  poems  in  Amer- 
can  poetry. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


F.  T.  Cooper,  —  Some  American  Story-Tellers. 

J.  C.  Underwood,  —  Literature  and  Insurgency. 

Theodore  Stanton,  —  A  Manual  of  American  Lit- 
erature. 

Henry  C.  Vedder,  —  American  Writers  of  To-day. 

H.  A.  Toulmin,  —  Social  Historians. 

A.  N.  Marquis,  —  Who's  Who  in  America. 

Jessie  B.  Rittenhouse,  —  The  Younger  American 
Poets. 

Edmund  Clarence  Stedman,  —  An  American  Anth- 
ology. 

Amy  Lowell,  —  Tendencies  in  Modern  American 
Poetry. 

Theodore  H.  Rand,  —  A  Treasury  of  Canadian 
Verse. 

John  W.  Garvin,  —  Canadian  Poets  and  Poetry. 

Fred  Lewis  Pattee,  —  A  History  of  American  Lit- 
erature since  1870. 

James  B.  Smiley,  —  A  Manual  of  American  Liter- 
ature. 

R.  L.  Paget,  —  The  Poetry  of  American  Wit  and 
Humor. 

Helen  M.  Winslow,  —  Literary  Boston  of  To-Day. 


V 

INDEX  OF  NAMES 


Abbott,  Eleanor  Hallowell,  35,  105 

Adams,  Henry,  11 

Allen,  Grant,  91 

Allen,  James  Lane,  23,  31,  36,  103 

Allinson,  Mrs.  Anne  C.  E.,  32 

Atherton,  Gertrude,  23,  25,  104 

Austin,  Mary,  60,  61,  104 

Bacheller,  Irving,  35 
BelascOj^avid^  59 
Timmnot,  Arthur  S.,  97,  107 
Bowne,  Borden  Parker,  20 
Braithwaite,  William  Stanley,  81 
Branch,  Anna  Hempstead,  70,  86,  106 
Broadhurst,  George,  59 
Brooks,  Phillips,  70 

Brown,  Alice,  23,  27,  60,  62,  86,  104,  106 
Bunner,  Henry  Cuyler,  23,  24,  70,  104 
Burroughs,  John,  15,  103 

Cable,  George  Washington,  23,  36 

Canfield,  Dorothy,  45,  56,  57,  105 

Carman,  Bliss,  76,  94,  95,  96,  107 

Cawein,  Madison,  70,  78,  106 

Channing,  Edward,  11 

Churchill,  Winston,  39,  52,  105 

Clemens,  Samuel  Langhorne,  39,  40,  58,  93,  103 

Coates,  Florence  Earle,  71 

Cohan,  George  M.,  59 

Cone,  Helen  Gray,  71 


—  ii8  — 

Crane,  Stephen,  35,  37,  105 

Crawford,  Francis  Marion,  15,  16,  32,  35,  38,  39,  41,  103 

Crothers,  Samuel  McChord,  15,  16,  104 

Dargan,  Olive  Tilford,  61,  68,  70,  83,  106 
Davis,  Richard  Harding,  56 
Deland,  Margaret,  23,  26,  39,  43,  104 
Dewey,  John,  20 
Dollard,  J.  B.,  97,  99 
Drummond,  William  Henry,  97 
Dunbar,  Paul  Laurence,  36,  70,  80,  106 
Duncan,  Sara  Jeanette,  93 
Durkin,  Douglas,  97,  99 

Fenollosa,  Mary  McNeil,  70,  87,  106 
l   ( Field,  Eugene,  70,  71,  106 

Fiske,  John,  II,  12,  103 

Fitch,  Clyde,  59,  60,  104 

Fletcher,  John  Gould,  71 

Ford,  Paul  Leicester,  56 

Fox,  John,  Jr.,  56 

Freeman,  Mary  E.  Wilkins,  23,  26,  104 

Frederic,  Harold,  55 
^    _Frost,  Robert,  71 

Garland,  Hamlin,  23,  24,  27,  104 
Gerould,  Katherine  Fullerton,  23 
Gillette,  William,  59 
Glasgow,  Ellen,  39,  53,  105 
Gordon,  Charles  William,  92,  107 
Grant,  Robert,  39,  40,  103 
Guiney,  Louise  Imogen,  71 
Guiterman,  Arthur,  71 

Hale,  Katherine,  97,  99,  107 
Hall,  Gertrude,  70,  85,  106 
Harrison,  Henry  Sydnor,  56,  105 
Hart,  Albert  Bushnell,  11 
Hearn,  Lafcadio,  15,  17,  103 
Herrick,  Robert,  32,  105 


—  ii9  — 

Howard,  Bronson,  59 

Howells,  William  Dean,  15,  39,  40,  80,  103 

Hovey,  Richard,  61,  69,  70,  76,  96,  106 

James,  Henry,  23,  28,  35,  36,  38,  45,  103 
James,  William,  20,  21,  103 
Johnston,  Richard  Malcolm,  36 
Johnston,  Mary,  56 

Kelly,  Myra,  23 
Kennedy,  Charles  Rann,  60 
Kenyon,  Charles,  60,  62 
Kilmer,  Joyce,  106 
Klein,  Charles,  59 
Knowles,  Frederick,  70,  106 
Knoblauch,  Edward,  60,  61 

Lampman,  Archibald,  97,  107 

Leacock,  Stephen,  29,  93,  107 

Lefevre,  Edwin,  32 

Lessing,  Bruno,  23 

Lincoln,  Joseph,  23 

Lindsay,  Vachel,  71  J~~ 

Logan,  John  D.,  97,  107 

London,  Jack,  23 

Lowell,  Amy,  71 

Mackaye,  Percy,  60,  62,  63 
Maclean,  Hugh,  J.,  97,  98,  107 
McMaster,  John  Bach,  11 
Mahan,  Alfred  Thayer,  11,  103 
Markham,  Edwin,  70,  74,  106 
Marshall,  W.  E.,  97,  98,  107 
Masters,  Edgar  Lee,  71 
Merington,  Marguerite,  63 
Middleton,  George,  60,  62,  63,  64 
Mifflin,  Lloyd,  70,  81,  105 
Miller,  Joaquin,  70  *f 

Mitchell,  Langdon,  59 


120 


Mitchell,  S.  Weir,  39,  103 
Monroe,  Harriet,  71 
Montgomery,  Lucy  M.,  93,  97,  107 
Moody,  William  Vaughn,  60,  61,  69,  70,  87,  105,  106 
More,  Paul  Elmer,  15,  16,  104 
Morgan,  Angela,  71 
/  0     Muir,  John,  22,  103 

Neihardt,  John  G.,  71 
//  __Norris,  Frank,  15,  16,  39,  49,  54,  55,  105 
Norwood,  Robert  W.,  97,  99,  107 

Oppenheim,  James,  23,  28,  105 
Osbourne,  Lloyd,  23 

Page,  Thomas  Nelson,  23,  28,  36,  103 

Parker,  Horatio  Gilbert,  92,  97,  107 

Peabody,  Josephine  Preston,  60,  67,  70,  86,  ic6 

Phillips,  David  Graham,  39,  46,  50,  104 

Pinski,  David,  60 

Poole,  Ernest,  56,  105 

Porter,  William  Sydney,  23,  29,  36,  104 

Reese,  Lizette  Woodworth,  70,  83,  106 

Repplier,  Agnes,  15,  16,  104 

Rhodes,  J.  F.,  11 

Rice,  Alice  Hegan,  80 

Rice,  Cale  Young,  70,  80,  106 

Riley,  James  Whitcomb,  70,  73,  105 

Roberts,  Charles  G.  D.,  91,  94,  96,  107 

Roberts,  Lloyd,  94,  107 

Roberts,  Theodore,  96 

Roberts,  William  Carman,  g6 

Robinson,  Edward  Arlington,  71 

Romanes,  George  John,  91 

Royce,  Josiah,  20,  103 

Santayana,  George,  22 

Saunders,  Margaret  Marshall,  93,  107 


121    

Schouler,  James,  n 
Scollard,  Clinton,  71,  106 
Scott,  Duncan  Campbell,  97,  99,  107 
Sedgwick,  Anne,  39,  53,  105 
Seeger,  Alan,  70,  82,  106 
Service,  Robert  W.,  97,  107 
Sheldon,  Edward,  60,  61 
Sherman,  Frank  Dempster,  70,  81,  106 
Smith,  F.  Hopkinson,  35,  36,  103 
Smith,  Goldwin,  91 
^Sterling,  George,  71 
Stewart,  Charles  D.,  39..  $7,  104 
Stimson,  F.  J.,  41 

Stuart,  Ruth  McEnery,  35,  36,  37,  104 
Sutherland,  Evelyn  Greenleaf,  63 

Tabb,  John  Banister,  70,  73,  105 
Tarkington,  Booth,  38,  105 
Teasdale,  Sara,  71 
Thomas,  Augustus,  59,  60 
Thomas,  Edith  M.,  70,  84,  106 
Train,  Arthur,  56 

van  Dyke,  Henry,  23,  24,  103 

Viele,  Herman  K.,  35,  37.  104 

Westcott,  Edward  N.,  56 
Wharton,  Edith,  35,  37,  104 
White,  William  Allen,  39,  48,.  104 
Whittier,  John  Greenleaf,  70,  105 
Wiggin,  Kate  Douglas,  35,  39,  44,  104 
Wilde,  Percival,  64,  105 
Wilson,  Woodrow,  11,  12,  104 
V    Wister,  Owen,  39,  45,  104 

Woodberry,  George  Edward,  70,  75,  106 

Yeoman,  Eric  Mackay,  97 


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